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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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My story: Stanley Levinson—ANS member since 1983
Levinson early in his career and today.
As a member of the American Nuclear Society, I have been to many conferences. The International Conference on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Analysis (PSA ’25), embedded in ANS Annual Meeting in Chicago in June, held special significance for me with the PSA ’25 opening plenary session recognizing the 50th anniversary of the publication of WASH-1400, which helped define my career. Reflecting on that milestone sent me back to 1975, when I was just an undergraduate student studying nuclear engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, N.Y., focusing on my mechanics, fluids, and thermodynamic classes as well as my first set of nuclear engineering classes. At that time—and many times since—the question “Why nuclear engineering?” was raised.
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.