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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Fusion Energy Week begins today
Fusion is riding a surge of attention that began in December 2022 when researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility achieved fusion ignition. The organizers of Fusion Energy Week—a group called the U.S. Fusion Outreach Team—on the other hand, trace fusion development back 100 years to the doctoral research of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered that stars, including our Sun, are mostly made of hydrogen and helium, which in turn led to the understanding that those elements are the “fuel” of potential fusion energy systems on Earth. In recognition of Payne-Gaposchkin’s birthday—May 10—the U.S. Fusion Outreach Team plans to hold a “grassroots celebration of fusion energy” May 6–10, 2024, and annually during the second week of May.
J. D. Galambos, L. John Perkins
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 25 | Number 2 | March 1994 | Pages 176-181
Technical Paper | Fusion Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A30266
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
If the next-step International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is designed to operate at finite energy multiplication (Q ∼ 10 to 20), as opposed to ignition (Q ∼ ∞), appreciable reductions in size and cost will result. Ignition will be attainable in such a “high-Q targeted” device under slightly enhanced confinement conditions. For example, with the nominal design guidelines from the ITER Conceptual Design Activity (CDA), designing for Q = 15 instead of ignition results in ∼20% savings in size and cost. Ignition would still be achievable in such a reduced-size device if the L-mode energy confinement enhancement factor (i.e., H factor) is ∼15% higher than the assumed nominal value of 2.0. This size/cost impact is large compared to other sensitivities, and the range of H-fact or improvement needed to recoup ignition is small compared to the uncertainty in the confinement scalings themselves.