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The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
S. C. Jardin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 3 | April 2011 | Pages 519-525
Lecture | Fourth ITER International Summer School (IISS2010) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11693
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A simple rigid plasma model is used to show that axisymmetric plasma instabilities (in two dimensions) will occur on a resistive time scale and do not depend on the plasma mass. This is the justification for ignoring the inertial term in two-dimensional studies of plasma shape control and vertical stability. In three dimensions, it is not normally possible to ignore the inertial terms when computing plasma instabilities. This results in a stiff system of equations (with multiple time scales) in which the driving terms causing plasma instabilities are small compared with the stable compressive terms. Techniques are described for implicit time integration and for representing the vector fields in a way to facilitate obtaining accurate solutions for plasma instabilities when a strong background magnetic field is present.