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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Robert M. Zubrin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 9 | Number 1 | January 1986 | Pages 97-100
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24705
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The possibility of using small initial charges of tritium and 3He to boost a deuterium field-reversed configuration (FRC) up to temperatures at which deuterium-deuterium (D-D) ignition can take place is examined. A computer program is used to track the rates of production, reaction, and leakage of the FRC plasma's isotopic constituents as the burn progresses and the FRC's temperature, density, and volume vary. On the basis of these studies and current scaling laws, a highly attractive advanced fuel FRC reactor is outlined. It is cylindrical, 12 m long, and 3.2 m in coil outer radius, and produces 1568 MW(electric), giving it an effective core power/volume ratio as great as a pressurized water reactor. No lithium blanket is required, as the tritium needed for startup can be bred by the D-D reactions themselves.