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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
DNFSB’s Summers ends board tenure, extending agency’s loss of quorum
Lee
Summers
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the independent agency responsible for ensuring that Department of Energy facilities are protective of public health and safety, announced that the board’s acting chairman, Thomas Summers, has concluded his service with the agency, having completed his second term as a board member on October 18.
Summers’ departure leaves Patricia Lee, who joined the DNFSB after being confirmed by the Senate in July 2024, as the board’s only remaining member and acting chair. Lee’s DNFSB board term ends in October 2027.
S. K. Ho, L. J. Perkins, S. W. Haney, R. B. Campbell
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1322-1326
Result of Large Experiment and Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29525
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several emergency plasma shutdown schemes for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) have been analyzed. The development of these procedures is critical in order to demonstrate a reliable safety system to respond to accidents resulting from failures in burn control systems, plasma facing components, and thermal conversion facilities. The schemes considered include shutting off the heating and fueling systems, triggering an H-mode to L-mode transition, injecting impurities, and disabling vertical stability control systems. Most of these methods are based on active detection and intervention primarily because the power producing element (the plasma) is not in direct communication with the media undergoing the accident condition (the coolant and blanket material). Time dependent simulations indicate that emergency shutdown time without triggering a disruption from the above schemes is only marginally acceptable.