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NC State celebrates 70 years of nuclear engineering education
An early picture of the research reactor building on the North Carolina State University campus. The Department of Nuclear Engineering is celebrating the 70th anniversary of its nuclear engineering curriculum in 2020–2021. Photo: North Carolina State University
The Department of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University has spent the 2020–2021 academic year celebrating the 70th anniversary of its becoming the first U.S. university to establish a nuclear engineering curriculum. It started in 1950, when Clifford Beck, then of Oak Ridge, Tenn., obtained support from NC State’s dean of engineering, Harold Lampe, to build the nation’s first university nuclear reactor and, in conjunction, establish an educational curriculum dedicated to nuclear engineering.
The department, host to the 2021 ANS Virtual Student Conference, scheduled for April 8–10, now features 23 tenure/tenure-track faculty and three research faculty members. “What a journey for the first nuclear engineering curriculum in the nation,” said Kostadin Ivanov, professor and department head.
R. Koch
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 2 | February 2008 | Pages 173-183
Technical Paper | Plasma Heating and Current Drive | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1703
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The heating of plasmas by fast ions, with a focus on Neutral Beam Injection (NBI), is reviewed. First, the need of auxiliary heating and current drive systems in fusion machines is outlined. For the particular case of tokamaks, the limitations of ohmic heating are discussed. The different ways of generating fast particles in plasmas are presented. The principle of operation of neutral beam injectors is explained. Positive-ion (PNBI) and negativeion (NNBI) based concepts are discussed. Next, the physical processes by which the beam transfers energy to the plasma, namely ionisation and slowing-down are described. For both, an elementary theory is given, whereby simple approximations to the distribution functions of beam injected ions and of alpha particles in reactors are obtained. Applications of NBI to heating, current drive and rotation drive are reviewed and the prospects of NBI for ITER are commented.
