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Supporting ANS now, for the future
Hash Hashemianpresident@ans.org
From kindergarten classrooms to national security facilities, each event I attended during the opening weeks of the new year underscored one truth: The future of nuclear energy depends on the people we inspire, educate, and empower today.
I had a busy start to 2026, first speaking at the Nashville Energy and Mining Summit alongside Tennessee Electric Cooperative Association senior vice president Justin Maierhofer to explore the necessary synergies among policy, academic coursework, research, and industry expertise in accelerating American nuclear innovation. Drawing on experiences in high-level government relations and public affairs and decades of work in nuclear instrumentation advancements, we discussed Tennessee’s nuclear renaissance, workforce development, and policy frameworks that support emerging energy demands.
Ronald F. Schmitt
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 2 | February 2010 | Pages 152-161
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9369
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two new methods for designing modular stellarator coils are presented. Stellarator coils provide necessary magnetic field to produce the plasma shape for a desired magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equilibrium. The methods optimize a continuous current on a surface - i.e., coil current is represented by a continuous-current sheet on a toroidal winding surface - and the process of coil cutting is not addressed. In contrast to previously published continuous-current methods that optimize coil current by minimizing the flux at the plasma boundary, the new methods presented in this paper search for optimal solutions by minimizing the displacement of the plasma boundary, i.e., the last closed magnetic surface. The physical displacement of the plasma boundary is computed from the magnetic field normal using linear MHD perturbation theory. A comparison with two similar continuous-current codes is given in terms of both methodology and results. The new codes show modest improvement over previously published continuous-current codes.