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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
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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.
Donald A. Spong, Jeff A. Holmes, Jean-n. Leboeuf, Peggy Jo Christenson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 18 | Number 3 | November 1990 | Pages 496-504
Alpha Particles in Fusion Research | Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29285
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Alpha-particle populations can significantly alter existing magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities in tokamaks through kinetic effects and coupling to otherwise stable shear Alfvén waves. Resonances of the trapped alpha-particle precessional drift, with the usual ballooning mode diamagnetic frequency (ω*i/2) and the toroidicity-induced Alfvén eigenmode (TAE), are considered. These are examined for noncircular tokamaks in the high-n ballooning limit using an isotropic alpha-particle slowing down distribution and retaining the full-energy and pitch-angle dispersion in the alpha-particle drift frequency. Applying this to the Compact Ignition Tokamak (CIT) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) indicates that ballooning instabilities can persist at betas below the ideal MHD threshold. These are especially dominated by the destabilization of the TAE mode. In addition, a hybrid fluid-particle approach for simulating alpha-particle effects on pressure-gradient driven instabilities is described.
