ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
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
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
E. S. Hotston
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1994 | Pages 203-221
Technical Paper | Divertor System | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A30323
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The exhaust modeling program for a fusion reactor based on a tokamak carried out for Next European Torus (NET)/International Tokamak Reactor (INTOR)/International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in the years 1982 to 1991 during which the author was involved is open to criticism on at least two counts. The first is that although in general there are at least two plasma configurations in the divertor that balance the upstream plasma pressure and power flow into the divertor, only one solution was accepted. The other solutions were assumed to be nonexistent or unimportant. The second count is that the possibility was not considered that atoms backscattered from the plasma could deposit power in the divertor target; inclusion of this process would have enlarged the domain in which multiple solutions are important. In particular, a plasma in which the temperatures are low appears as a possible solution. Here the atomic and molecular properties of the fuel, which vary quite rapidly with the electron temperature, are very important, so obtaining this solution by an implicit procedure is difficult. The two-dimensional modeling programs referred to earlier were carried out with the use of the Braams plasma transport code, which relies on a “strongly implicit method” for its updating. Examination of this code shows that the techniques used to stabilize it are incompatible with the procedures required to find the low-temperature solution. These objections would remain in the case where a Monte Carlo code is used to trace the fate of the neutrals recycled in the divertor. Recent modeling work based on Monte Carlo codes suggests that the plasma temperatures of the higher temperature solutions are likely to be greater than previously thought. Thus, resolution of the problem of finding the lower temperature solutions becomes important.