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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
E. R. Hodgson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 62 | Number 1 | July-August 2012 | Pages 89-96
Diagnostics | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Fusion Reactor Materials, Part A: Fusion Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A14118
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Present ITER diagnostics are designed to provide machine protection, basic and advanced control, fusion performance evaluation, and an extensive measurement capability for furthering plasma physics understanding. However, in the longer term beyond ITER, diagnostic components and associated materials must survive extended periods in the more hostile environment of not only DEMO, but also fusion power plants. In addition to the need to minimize penetrations in the first wall, undoubtedly due to their known high sensitivity to radiation, the use of insulators, and hence diagnostics, will be further severely restricted to those essential to operation, safety, and maintenance related to plasma control and machine protection. The problems we will have to address are related to long-term fluence or dose-related degradation of the required properties due to aggregation and segregation of radiation-induced defects and impurities present in the original materials, as well as H, He, and other transmutation elements. To resolve these challenges, long-term research activities must increase. For the diagnostics (and other systems), in situ irradiation testing is essential. In the near- to mid-term future, available experimental fission reactors will be invaluable, where even basic problems such as irradiation in vacuum and temperature control must be overcome.