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
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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
Mar 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
February 2024
Latest News
Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
Karl H. Spatschek
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 37 | Number 2 | March 2000 | Pages 95-111
Kinetic Theory | doi.org/10.13182/FST00-A11963204
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this overview, the main arguments for a kinetic description of a classical, non-relativistic many-body system are reviewed. The need and strategy for a kinetic description of plasma particles are discussed. The Vlasov, the Landau-Fokker-Planck, and the Balescu-Lenard equations are presented as the most useful kinetic equations for the particle distribution functions. In the second part, some simple applications are discussed. First, collision frequencies are derived. Second, it is shown that in the mean field approximation a linearization of the initial value problem can already give interesting insights into the (collective) dynamic behaviors. Third, quasi-linear and weak turbulence theories are discussed. Fourth, it is argued why in many cases a reduction to a plasmadynamic (fluid) description is appropriate, and popular truncations are summarized. Finally, the generality of the statistical methods is demonstrated on the example of magnetic field line diffusion.