ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
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.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
Latest Magazine Issues
May 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
July 2025
Nuclear Technology
June 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Canada clears Darlington to produce Lu-177 and Y-90
The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has amended Ontario Power Generation’s power reactor operating license for Darlington nuclear power plant to authorize the production of the medical radioisotopes lutetium-177 and yttrium-90.
L. P. Ku, P. R. Garabedian
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 207-215
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1237
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have identified and developed new classes of quasi-axially symmetric configurations that have attractive properties from the standpoint of both near-term physics experiments and long-term power-producing reactors. These include configurations with very small aspect ratios (~2.5) having superior quasi-symmetry and energetic particle confinement characteristics, and configurations with strongly negative global magnetic shear from the shaping fields so that the overall rotational transform, when combined with the transform from bootstrap currents at finite plasma pressures, will have a small but positive shear, making the avoidance of low-order rational surfaces at a given operating beta possible. Additionally, we have found configurations with National Compact Stellarator Experiment-like characteristics but with the biased components in the magnetic spectrum that allow us to improve the confinement of energetic particles. For each new class of configurations, we have also designed coils to ensure that the new configurations are realizable and engineering-wise feasible. The coil designs typically have the properties of R/min(C-P) 6 and R/min(C-C) 10, where R is the plasma major radius and min(C-P) and min(C-C) are the minimum coil-to-plasma and coil-to-coil separations, respectively. These coil properties allow power-producing reactors to be designed with R < 9 m for deuterium-tritium plasmas with a full breeding blanket. The good quasi-axisymmetry limits the energy loss of alpha particles to below 10%.