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The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Fusion Science and Technology
February 2025
Latest News
Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
M. Rampp, R. Preuss, R. Fischer, K. Hallatschek, L. Giannone
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 62 | Number 3 | November 2012 | Pages 409-418
Selected Paper from Seventh Fusion Data Validation Workshop 2012 (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-481
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To achieve real-time control of fusion plasmas, the flux distribution and derived quantities have to be calculated within the time of the machine control cycle, which in the case of the ASDEX-Upgrade experiment can be as small as 1 ms. To this end we have developed a fast numerical solver for the Grad-Shafranov equation, which allows exploitation of the parallel capabilities of modern multicore processors. Our implementation, termed GPEC (Garching parallel equilibrium code), is based entirely on open-source software components. For a numerical grid of size 32 × 64, our new code requires only 0.04 ms (0.11 ms for 64 × 128) for a single call of the Grad-Shafranov solver using a standard Intel Xeon quad-core CPU (3.2 GHz). We also show the first GPEC benchmark results obtained on the Intel Sandy Bridge eight-core server processor and demonstrate the relevance of the new solver for application in plasma equilibrium codes.
