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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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
Russia withdraws from 25-year-old weapons-grade plutonium agreement
Russia’s lower house of Parliament, the State Duma, approved a measure to withdraw from a 25-year-old agreement with the United States to cut back on the leftover plutonium from Cold War–era nuclear weapons.
G. W. Barnes, A. Janos, D. Loesser, D. K. Owens, M. Ulrickson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 1761-1764
Impurity Control and Plasma-Facing Component | Proceedings of the Ninth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Oak Brook, Illinois, October 7-11, 1990) | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29597
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The TFTR Bumper Limiter (BL)1,2 is a continuous toroidal belt limiter which subtends 120° poloidally on the inner wall of the vacuum vessel, is symmetric about the midplane of the vessel and has a total area of 22 m2. The plasma facing surface of the BL consists of graphite tiles mounted on water-cooled Inconel backing plates. During plasma operation with high power neutral beam injection (NBI), “carbon blooms”3 developed when surface temperatures at localized areas on the limiter exceeded 1700 C. The blooms severely limited plasma performance. During the February–April 1990 shutdown, 721 of the original POCO graphite tiles were replaced with 4D Carbon Fiber Composite (CFC)4 tiles to improve the performance of the Bumper Limiter. Another source of blooms was cutouts in the BL made for diagnostic access to the plasma. During the shutdown, the edge tiles at the cutouts were modified to reduce the power flux to levels insufficient to cause a bloom. This paper describes the tile replacement and modification program including material selection and the rationale for the tile replacement locations. The methods used to mechanically align the midplane of the limiter to ±0.5mm are addressed. Future plans to align the entire limiter to the toroidal magnetic field to similar accuracy using magnetic and mechanical measurements will also be discussed. The improvement in plasma performance due to the suppression of blooms due to these upgrades will be shown.