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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Fermilab center renamed after late particle physicist Helen Edwards
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Integrated Engineering Research Center, which officially opened in January 2024, is now known as the Helen Edwards Engineering Center. The name was changed to honor the late particle physicist who led the design, construction, commissioning, and operation of the lab’s Tevatron accelerator and was part of the Water Resources Development Act signed by President Biden in December 2024, according to a Fermilab press release.
G. Brunton, A. Casey, M. Christensen, R. Demaret, M. Fedorov, M. Flegel, P. Folta, T. Frazier, M. Hutton, L. Kegelmeyer, L. Lagin, P. Ludwigsen, R. Reed, D. Speck, K. Wilhelmsen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 1 | January-February 2016 | Pages 352-365
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-164
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Orchestration of every National Ignition Facility (NIF) shot cycle is managed by the Integrated Computer Control System (ICCS), which uses a scalable software architecture running code on more than 1950 front-end processors, embedded controllers, and supervisory servers. The ICCS operates laser and industrial control hardware containing 66 000 control and monitor points to ensure that all of NIF’s laser beams arrive at the target within 30 ps of each other and are aligned to a pointing accuracy of less than 50 μm root-mean-square, while ensuring that a host of diagnostic instruments record data in a few billionths of a second. NIF’s automated control subsystems are built from a common object-oriented software framework that distributes the software across the computer network and achieves interoperation between different software languages and target architectures. A large suite of business and scientific software tools supports experimental planning, experimental setup, facility configuration, and post-shot analysis. Standard business services using open-source software, commercial workflow tools, and database and messaging technologies have been developed. An information technology infrastructure consisting of servers, network devices, and storage provides the foundation for these systems. This paper is an overview of the control and information systems used to support a wide variety of experiments during the National Ignition Campaign.