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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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
October 2025
Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
Matthew J. Jasica, Gerald L. Kulcinski, John F. Santarius
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 4 | November 2017 | Pages 719-725
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1350482
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new experimental facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Dual-Advanced Ion Simultaneous Implantation Experiment (DAISIE), has been designed and constructed to examine tungsten surface damage phenomena. These include microstructure formation and erosion due to helium bombardment as well as the retention of hydrogen gas while under the simultaneous bombardment of helium and deuterium ion beams, as would occur in ITER or other deuterium-burning fusion devices. DAISIE features two ion guns angled at 55° to the sample normal. These guns are independent with respect to beam current, allowing for a high degree of control over the separate D and He beams fluxes and fluences and the composition ratio of these ions impinging upon the tungsten sample surface. Preliminary results are available for helium-only implantations at energies of 30 keV to average fluences of 3 × 1018 He/cm2 in tungsten samples at temperatures of 900°C. As in prior experiments, surface damage appears to be highly-dependent on the crystallography of the individual grains. although a distinct set of helium-induced microstructures from past experiments is observed. Erosion yield is consistent with prior, similar helium irradiation experiments at the University of Wisconsin, but exceeds that predicted by physical sputtering yields and other past sputtering experiments.