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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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August 2025
Latest News
DOE fast tracks test reactor projects: What to know
The Department of Energy today named 10 companies that want to get a test reactor critical within the next year using the DOE’s offer to authorize test reactors outside of national laboratories. As first outlined in one of the four executive orders on nuclear energy released by President Trump on May 23 and in the request for applications for the Reactor Pilot Program released June 18, the companies must use their own money and sites—and DOE authorization—to get reactors operating. What they won’t need is a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license.
R. Keppens, J. W. S. Blokland
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 131-138
Technical Paper | Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics - Equilibrium and Instabilities | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1112
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear fusion research promises to harvest the excess energy carried by energetic neutrons when Deuterium and Tritium hydrogen isotopes are fused together to form -particles. Pressure and density conditions needed for these fusion reactions ensure that these charged constituents, together with the free electrons, form a fully ionized plasma at temperatures of about 100 million Kelvin. Any contact with material walls would instantaneously cool the plasma and must be avoided. In the axisymmetric toroidal vessel of a tokamak, a hot plasma is confined primarily by magnetic Lorentz forces. Strong helical magnetic fields that trace out nested toroidal surfaces help to thermally insulate the plasma from the walls and support it against its own pressure gradient. To lowest order, a fluid model of the equilibrium considers only this force balance in the poloidal cross-section of the tokamak, as expressed analytically by the Grad-Shafranov equation.