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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
S. L. Painter, J. F. Lyon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 16 | Number 2 | September 1989 | Pages 157-171
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST89-A29145
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Loss of alpha particles from compact torsatron reactors with M = 6, 9, and 12, where M is the number of field periods, is studied. The direct loss is a relatively weak function of radius and energy and varies from ≃33% for M = 6 to ≃18% for M = 12. Loss of alpha particles through scattering into the loss region is calculated using the Fokker-Planck equation and is found to contribute an additional alpha-particle energy loss of ≃15%. The consequences of these relatively large losses for torsatron reactor design are discussed. A figure of merit that characterizes the orbit confinement for a magnetic configuration is deduced and used to show how the direct alpha-particle losses might be reduced.