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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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
Sep 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
October 2025
Nuclear Technology
September 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NNSA awards BWXT $1.5B defense fuels contract
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded BWX Technologies a contract valued at $1.5 billion to build a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant in Tennessee in support of the administration’s efforts to build out a domestic supply of unobligated enriched uranium for defense-related nuclear fuel.
Hiromu Momota, George H. Miley
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 40 | Number 1 | July 2001 | Pages 56-65
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST01-A180
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
"Double-well" potential structure (virtual cathode formation) is studied in a stationary spherical inertial electrostatic confinement (SIEC) using the nonlinear Poisson's equation and particle densities derived from kinetic theory. A novel method to obtain a spherically symmetric stationary distribution function is introduced and an integral-differential equation is simplified by applying a relevant approximated formula for an integral. Electron and ion beams are collision-free, and their velocities are roughly aligned toward the spherical center, but with a slight divergence. Analyses show that the angular momentum of ions and the smaller one of electrons create a virtual cathode, i.e., a double-well structure, of the electrostatic potential on a potential hill near the center. The density limit of an SIEC is exhibited, and the condition relevant to form a deep potential well is presented.