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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.
Matthew J. Jasica, Gerald L. Kulcinski, John F. Santarius
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 110-119
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1693204
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A custom designed and manufactured set of ion guns has been in use at the University of Wisconsin Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Laboratory for both beam fusion experiments and materials implantation experiments. For the first time, direct measurements have been made on the spatial profiles and the mass compositions of He and D ion beams produced by these guns. The results validate assumptions about the circular Gaussian spatial profiles for both He and D ion beams. Mass composition measurements of the He beam identified a pressure-dependent minimum impurity content of 15% N+. The D beam contained relative molecular ion fractions of 58% D3+, 32% D2+, and 10% D+ with impurities of 15% to 20% D2O+. A new experimental platform, the Ion Beam and Source Analyzer was developed to perform these experiments on the ion guns used to irradiate candidate fusion materials.