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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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Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
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.
Marius Zamfirache, Liviu Stefan, Anisia Bornea, Ioan Stefanescu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 3 | April 2015 | Pages 677-680
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T108
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
ICSI Rm. Valcea has developed an experimental pilot-scale installation for tritium and deuterium separation. The main objective of this pilot was to demonstrate the water detritiation technology and further to transfer this technology to CANDU nuclear power plant from CNE Cernavoda, in whose development program there is the achieving of a Tritium Removal Facility (since 2004).
The installation design was initiated in 1992, and in 1997 its construction was completed. Design and construction of this installation was performed similarly with chemical plants, specifically for hydrogen. Separation of isotopes was addressed in the first phase only regarding hydrogen and deuterium. In the next stage we started to transform it in a nuclear plant for processing tritium. Moving to tritium separation imposed the technological change of cryogenic distillation module aiming the tritium extraction at high concentrations.
Changes have been made with great efforts and consisted mainly of: redesign of the technological systems for nuclear material processing, applying specific codes and standards (ASME, Romanian nuclear specific pressure boundary prescriptions for code classification); design and implementation of new systems, classified as safety systems; redesign and implementation of command and control systems, complying with the requirements of reliability and maintenance required for the project promoted; revaluation of auxiliary systems (utilities, power supply, including UPS); introducing radiation protection systems, including secondary barriers; implementing and maintaining environment operational program specific to the new nuclear plant; developing and conducting safety analyzes; development of specific documentation to obtain the necessary permits for construction, commissioning and operation of the plant.
This paper presents the implications of moving from a chemical plant towards a nuclear installation applying codes and standards specifically to nuclear field. It is a lesson for those who approaches their research in this regard.
