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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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!
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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
C. C. Baker, D. A. Ehst, J. N. Brooks, K. Evans, Jr.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 709-716
Fusion Reactor Design—I | Proceedings of the Seveth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Reno, Nevada, June 15–19, 1986) | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24825
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A number of advances in plasma physics and engineering promise to greatly improve the reactor prospects of tokamaks. The following features, in particular, have been examined: (a) large aspect ratio (A ≈ 6), which may ease maintenance; (b) high beta (β ≳ 0.20) without indentation, which brings the maximum toroidal field down to about 7 T; (c) low toroidal current (I ≈ 5MA), which reduces the cost of the current drive and equilibrium field system; and (d) steady state operation with current density control via fast and slow wave current drive. The key to high beta operation with low toroidal current lies in utilizing second stability regime equilibria with the required current distributions produced by an appropriate selection of wave driver frequencies and power spectra. The ray tracing and current drive calculation is self-consistent with the actual magnetic fields produced in the plasma. In addition to matching desirable high-beta equilibria, this method is capable of producing a large variety of new equilibria, many of which look attractive. The impurity control activities in TPSS have emphasized the self-pumping concept as applied to using the entire first wall or “slot” limiters. The blanket design effort has emphasized liquid metal and Flibe concepts. The reference concept is a liquid lithium/vanadium, self-cooled configuration. Overall, there exists a number of major design improvements which will substantially improve the attractiveness of tokamak reactors.