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
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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
Aug 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
Latest News
The newest era of workforce development at ANS
As most attendees of this year’s ANS Annual Conference left breakfast in the Grand Ballroom of the Chicago Downtown Marriott to sit in on presentations covering everything from career pathways in fusion to recently digitized archival nuclear films, 40 of them made their way to the hotel’s fifth floor to take part in the second offering of Nuclear 101, a newly designed certification course that seeks to give professionals who are in or adjacent to the industry an in-depth understanding of the essentials of nuclear energy and engineering from some of the field’s leading experts.
William L. Barr, Ralph W. Moir
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 3 | Number 1 | January 1983 | Pages 98-111
Technical Paper | Energy Storage, Switching, and Conversion | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A20820
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The power carried out through the ends of a mirror fusion reactor by escaping plasma can be converted directly into electricity by a plasma direct converter. Test results from three plasma direct converters are described. The first two tests were performed with a steady-state power density up to 70 W/cm2 to simulate the predicted conditions on a reactor (∼100 W/cm2). A single-stage unit and a two-stage unit of the venetian-blind type were tested up to 100 kV and 6 kW for a total time of ∼80 h. In scaling up in energy from previous experiments, the new effects that became important were the ionization of background gas and the release of secondary electrons at surfaces. In the third test, a single-stage unit was mounted on the end wall of the Tandem Mirror Experiment (TMX) device where it intercepted some of the end-loss plasma. Of the 138 W incident on the direct converter, 79 W were recovered and 12 W were used to power the suppressor grid. The net efficiency was therefore 48%; this was in good agreement with predictions for a single-stage unit and the TMX plasma parameters. These test results lend confidence to our direct-converter designs for fusion reactors. The remaining area of concern includes the general problem imposed by high-voltage breakdown in a large direct converter with many joules of stored energy.