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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Christian Petrie, Niyanth Sridharan (ORNL), Curtis Frederick, Travis McFalls, Sudarsanam Suresh Babu (Univ of Tennessee), Adam Hehr, Mark Norfolk (Fabrisonic LLC), John Sheridan (Sheridan Solutions LLC)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 459-468
Qualification and commercialization of new nuclear fuels and materials requires a comprehensive set of data regarding behavior under irradiation. There are currently very limited options for in-situ monitoring of material evolution during irradiation due to the extremely harsh environment (i.e., high temperatures and intense radiation) of materials test reactors. This paper describes work being performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to embed metal-coated fiber-optic sensors into in-core irradiation experiments to enable measurement of radial dimensional changes and spatially distributed temperature and strain. Some critical issues that must be addressed before embedded fiber optics can be deployed in-core include (1) embedding of metal-coated fibers without failure or prohibitively large signal attenuation, (2) embedding in curved channels to allow for radial dimensional measurements, and (3) demonstrating that embedded fibers can survive the large stresses that result from differential thermal expansion between the glass fiber and the surrounding metal matrix. This work shows how optical fibers have been successfully embedded in aluminum and copper alloys in both straight and curved channels with various bend radii. The embedded fibers have also survived heating to temperatures of 500°C and cooling to room temperature. This paper presents some of the experimental results including measured light attenuation resulting from embedding with and without bends and high-temperature testing.