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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.
Guido Van Oost
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 53 | Number 2 | February 2008 | Pages 356-366
Technical Paper | Anomalous Transport | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1721
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The importance of radial (i.e. perpendicular to the magnetic surface) electric fields was already recognised early in the research on controlled thermonuclear fusion. An initial description of electric field effects in toroidal confinement was given by Budker. Such a configuration with combined magnetic and electric confinement ("magnetoelectric confinement", where the electric field provides a toroidal equilibrium configuration without rotational transform) was studied by Stix, who suggested that a reactor-grade plasma under magnetoelectric confinement (electric fields of order 1 MV/cm) may reach a quasi-steady-state with ambipolar loss of electrons and some suprathermal ions (e.g. 3.5 MeV -particles). Experiments such as on the Electric Field Bumpy Torus EFBT provided quite favourable scaling for particle confinement. The possible importance of radial electric fields for transport was in the past repeatedly established. Since the early days the plasma potential has been measured in tokamaks such as ST, TM-4 and ISX-B, but because no significant effects of the radial electric field Er on plasma transport were observed under the machine conditions at that time, no further research was conducted in tokamaks.