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Latest News
The RAIN scale: A good intention that falls short
Radiation protection specialists agree that clear communication of radiation risks remains a vexing challenge that cannot be solved solely by finding new ways to convey technical information.
Earlier this year, an article in Nuclear News described a new radiation risk communication tool, known as the Radiation Index, or, RAIN (“Let it RAIN: A new approach to radiation communication,” NN, Jan. 2025, p. 36). The authors of the article created the RAIN scale to improve radiation risk communication to the general public who are not well-versed in important aspects of radiation exposures, including radiation dose quantities, units, and values; associated health consequences; and the benefits derived from radiation exposures.
Boris Breizman
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 3 | April 2011 | Pages 549-560
Lecture | Fourth ITER International Summer School (IISS2010) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11696
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The buildup of the energetic particle population in fusion plasmas is typically slow compared to the growth times of energetic-particle driven instabilities. This feature draws special attention to nonlinear studies of unstable waves in the near-threshold regimes. The goal is to characterize the long-time behavior of the weakly dissipative waves and resonant particles in the presence of particle sources and sinks. There are numerous experimental observations of energetic-particle driven instabilities. In some cases the unstable modes grow to a level at which they cause enhanced transport and anomalous losses of the fast particles. In other cases the losses are small but the modes exhibit an intricate nonlinear behavior: generation of sidebands, quasi-periodic bursts, change of the mode frequency in time, etc. This lecture, presented at the 4th ITER International Summer School in Austin, Texas, provides a first-principles physics basis for understanding these phenomena.