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WIPP: Lessons in transportation safety
As part of a future consent-based approach by the federal government to site new deep geologic repositories for nuclear waste, local communities and states that are considering hosting such facilities are sure to have many questions. Currently, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is the only example of such a repository in operation, and it offers the opportunity for state and local officials to visit and judge for themselves the risks and benefits of hosting a similar facility. But its history can also provide lessons for these officials, particularly the political process leading up to the opening of WIPP, the safety of WIPP operations and transportation of waste from generator facilities to the site, and the economic impacts the project has had on the local area of Carlsbad, as well as the rest of the state of New Mexico.
Hartmut Zohm
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 2 | August 2007 | Pages 134-144
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 1 | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1492
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A review of recent experimental results in electron cyclotron (EC) resonance heating and EC current drive (CD) (ECCD) is given. Special emphasis is put on the recent developments of new schemes in which EC waves can heat and drive current in magnetically confined fusion plasmas. These comprise scenarios to overcome the density cutoff experienced in application of the classical first-harmonic ordinary mode (O1) and second-harmonic extraordinary mode (X2) schemes as well as to increase the CD efficiency of EC waves while maintaining their good localization. In particular, we discuss recent experimental progress in tokamaks, stellarators, and spherical tori in the areas of the second-harmonic ordinary mode (O2), third-harmonic extraordinary mode (X3), and electron Bernstein wave schemes [mostly Ordinary-eXtraordinary-Bernstein (O-X-B) scheme] as well as experiments in which the combination of ECCD with lower hybrid CD leads to a synergetic increase of the ECCD efficiency. A particular application of ECCD that has recently received much attention and is therefore reviewed in this paper is the suppression of neoclassical tearing modes (NTMs) by ECCD. We show that the theoretically predicted requirements for ECCD in terms of deposition (maximizing the ECCD driven current density) and injection in phase with the O-point of the magnetic island associated with the NTM (which is needed when the island width falls below the deposition width) have been verified experimentally. Also, many of the elements needed for constructing a reliable, feedback-controlled NTM suppression system for ITER based on ECCD have now been demonstrated experimentally, and the next step, which is their integration into a reliable scheme, is well within reach.
