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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
T. Cho, J. Kohagura, M. Hirata, T. Numakura, R. Minami, T. Okamura, T. Sasuga, Y. Nishizawa, M. Yoshida, M. Yoshikawa, Y. Nakashima, Y. Sakamoto, T. Tamano, K. Yatsu, S. Miyoshi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 35 | Number 1 | January 1999 | Pages 151-155
Oral Presentations | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A11963841
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
(i) A scaling law and its physics mechanism of potential formation for tandem-mirror plasma confinement are investigated. The first result of a generalized scaling covering over two typical plasma operational modes in the GAMMA 10 tandem mirror is presented; that is, a previously obtained potential-formation scaling in a plasma operational mode with a few-kV confinement potentials is found to be extended and generalized to a potential scaling in a hot-ion operational mode with thermal-neutron yield, when we take account of the dependence of potential formation on the ratio of the plug to the central-cell densities as well as the relation of electron temperatures in the central cell to thermal-barrier potentials. The finding of the existence of the same physics basis underlying in these two typical modes may provide the future possibility of simultaneously obtained hot-ion plasmas with high potentials. (ii) For these scaling studies, we have constructed the physics fundamentals of x-ray diagnostics; that is, we proposed a novel theory on the energy response of a widely utilized semiconductor x-ray detector. The theory solves a serious problem of a recent finding of the invalidity of the conventional standard theory on the response of such an x-ray detector; the conventional theory has widely been believed and employed over the last quarter of the century in various research fields including plasma-electron researches in most of plasma-confinement devices. The novel theory on the semiconductor x-ray response is characterized by the inclusion of a three-dimensional diffusion of x-ray-produced minority carriers in the field-free substrate of a detector, while the conventional theory is based only on the charges from an x-ray-sensitive depletion layer (i.e., the region of a p-n junction). Various and serious effects of the novel theory on the determination of electron temperatures and their radial profiles (i.e., the electron-temperature gradient) are also represented.