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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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NN Asks: What did you learn from ANS’s Nuclear 101?
Mike Harkin
When ANS first announced its new Nuclear 101 certificate course, I was excited. This felt like a course tailor-made for me, a transplant into the commercial nuclear world. I enrolled for the inaugural session held in November 2024, knowing it was going to be hard (this is nuclear power, of course)—but I had been working on ramping up my knowledge base for the past year, through both my employer and at a local college.
The course was a fast-and-furious roller-coaster ride through all the key components of the nuclear power industry, in one highly challenging week. In fact, the challenges the students experienced caught even the instructors by surprise. Thankfully, the shared intellectual stretch we students all felt helped us band together to push through to the end.
We were all impressed with the quality of the instructors, who are some of the top experts in the field. We appreciated not only their knowledge base but their support whenever someone struggled to understand a concept.
James A. Blink
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 9 | Number 3 | May 1986 | Pages 381-390
Technical Paper | ICF Chamber Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24726
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The pulsed, localized fusion source in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) permits scale-down of reactor dimensions and fusion yield in development facilities while still maintaining full-scale reactor surface and volume energy loads. Hence, the power and geometric scale of ICF development facilities can be much smaller than comparable magnetic fusion facilities. The power is reduced by reducing both the pulse rate and the target gain; however, full gain and pulse rate experiments of limited duration will be possible. At least three engineering facilities will be required for the development of heavy-ion beam or short wavelength laser driven fusion power. The design and construction times required for large facilities produce a nominal plan with a demonstration (DEMO) plant operating around the year 2018, and a crash plan with DEMO operation in 2009. Fusion breeder development is expected to follow a similar time line, except that a crash (option-limited) plan could succeed as early as the turn of the century.