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
March 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
January 2026
Latest News
Fusion energy: Progress, partnerships, and the path to deployment
Over the past decade, fusion energy has moved decisively from scientific aspiration toward a credible pathway to a new energy technology. Thanks to long-term federal support, we have significantly advanced our fundamental understanding of plasma physics—the behavior of the superheated gases at the heart of fusion devices. This knowledge will enable the creation and control of fusion fuel under conditions required for future power plants. Our progress is exemplified by breakthroughs at the National Ignition Facility and the Joint European Torus.
R. Giannella, M. Roccella
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 18 | Number 2 | September 1990 | Pages 201-222
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29294
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An analysis (in terms of different figures of merit) of the performances of several recently proposed tokamaks (IGNITOR, Compact Ignition Tokamak, IGNITEX, JIT, Enhanced Tokamak, Next European Torus, Candor) has been performed. The analysis was carried out according to different scaling laws and in various operating scenarios (temperature and density profile control, low and high energy confinement modes). In the plasma model, profile consistency between current density and temperature was assumed, taking into account neoclassical conductivity and the related physical constraints. The profiles obtained simulate the experimental data fairly well for both lower and higher collisional plasmas. A code was developed for this purpose that produces the stationary state contours for a given tokamak at different additional power levels once the scaling law is fixed. For a given machine, automatic analyses of these diagrams can be carried out for different confinement scaling laws and operating conditions. For a given scaling law and operating scenario, the code scans the configuration space looking for the “machines” capable of reaching ignition according to some simple technological constraints. The results for the most conservative situation are also shown.