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
Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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
Apr 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2024
Nuclear Technology
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.
C. E. Myers, M. R. Edwards, B. Berlinger, A. Brooks, S. A. Cohen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 86-103
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13341
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) experiment employs an odd-parity rotating-magnetic-field (RMFo) current drive and plasma heating system to form and sustain high- plasmas. For radial confinement, an array of coaxial, internal, passive flux conserver (FC) rings applies magnetic pressure to the plasma while still allowing radio-frequency RMFo from external coils to reach the plasma. The 3-ms pulse duration of the present experiment is limited by the skin time fc of its room-temperature copper FC rings. To explore plasma phenomena with longer characteristic times, the pulse duration of the next-generation PFRC-2 device will exceed 100 ms, necessitating FC rings with fc > 300 ms. In this paper we review the physics of internal, discrete, passive FCs and describe the evolution of the PFRC's FC array. We then detail new experiments that have produced higher-performance FC rings that contain embedded high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tapes. Several HTS tape winding configurations have been studied, and a wide range of extended skin times, from 0.4 s to >103 s, has been achieved. The new FC rings must carry up to 2.5 kA of current to balance the expected PFRC-2 plasma pressure, so the dependence of the HTS-FC critical current on the winding configuration and operating temperature has also been studied. From these experiments, the key HTS-FC design considerations have been identified and HTS-FC rings with the desired performance characteristics have been produced.