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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
F. Castejón, A. Cappa, M. Tereshchenko, S. S. Pavlov, A. Fernández
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 2 | August 2007 | Pages 230-239
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 1 | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1502
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The relativistic effects on electron Bernstein wave (EBW) heating of plasmas confined in the TJ-II stellarator are presented in this work. The Ordinary-eXtraordinary-Bernstein mode conversion at the fundamental electron cyclotron harmonic (f = 28 GHz for the TJ-II central magnetic field) is chosen as the scenario for these estimates. This heating scheme presents high absorbed power for central densities above 1.2 × 1019 m-3 and has no upper density limit. Relativistic and nonrelativistic calculations have been performed using the TRUBA beam/ray-tracing code. For this purpose, the weakly relativistic dispersion relation valid for any values of the parallel and perpendicular refractive indexes, thus suitable for EBW, has been obtained. This dispersion relation has been introduced in TRUBA to estimate the ray trajectories and the power absorption to all orders of Larmor radius in the weakly relativistic regime. The result of our comparison is that the relativistic effects are not negligible and must be taken into account both on the ray trajectories and in the power absorption estimations. We also show that the relativistic absorption coefficient is lower than the nonrelativistic one, for the values of parallel refractive index that happen in TJ-II, and the power deposition profile is more centered.
