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
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Feb 2026
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
February 2026
Nuclear Technology
January 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Playing the “bad guy” to enhance next-generation safety
Sometimes, cops and robbers is more than just a kid’s game. At the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, researchers are channeling their inner saboteurs to discover vulnerabilities in next-generation nuclear reactors, making sure that they’re as safe as possible before they’re even constructed.
K. Lackner
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 4 | November 2008 | Pages 989-993
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1914
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To measure the reactor relevance of existing and planned confinement devices, we propose Bta5/4 and Pheata3/4 as dimensionless engineering parameters. These quantities - together with a density parameter that can be written as na3/4/Bt - have to be conserved in plasma physics identity experiments on different-size devices to respect the so-called Kadomtsev similarity constraints. They offer also a coordinate system to map the approach to the reactor regime. Theoretical and semiempirical models can be used in this coordinate space to produce isocontours for different dimensionless physics quantities, like the usual parameters *, *, and , but also for the intensity of collisional coupling, the excess of heating power over the L-H transition threshold, and the ratio of current redistribution to energy confinement time to visualize the distance to the regime of a fusion reactor.