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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
Shifting the paradigm of supply chain
Chad Wolf
When I began my nuclear career, I was coached up in the nuclear energy culture of the day to “run silent, run deep,” a mindset rooted in the U.S. Navy’s submarine philosophy. That was the norm—until Fukushima.
The nuclear renaissance that many had envisioned hit a wall. The focus shifted from expansion to survival. Many utility communications efforts pivoted from silence to broadcast, showcasing nuclear energy’s elegance and reliability. Nevertheless, despite being clean baseload 24/7 power that delivered a 90 percent capacity factor or higher, nuclear energy was painted as risky and expensive (alongside energy policies and incentives that favored renewables).
Economics became a driving force threatening to shutter nuclear power. The Delivering the Nuclear Promise initiative launched in 2015 challenged the industry to sustain high performance yet cut costs by up to 30 percent.
Yasunori Ohkuma, Kiyomitsu Suzuki, Yasuyuki Nogi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 27 | Number 3 | April 1995 | Pages 357-360
Compact Torus (Field-Reversed Configuration, Spheromak) Concepts | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A11947105
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A rotational instability is observed in a field-reversed configuration plasma. Onset time, growth rate and modal frequency of the instability are measured in connection with the ion diamagnetic drift frequency over a wide range of plasma parameters. When the plasma is stabilized by a quadrupole field, it shrinks axially with time and its particle confinement time becomes shorter than that of a nonstabilized plasma. A numerical calculation of the field profile reveals that the distortion of the confinement field by the quadrupole field at the ends of the separatrix is responsible for the degradation of particle confinement. However, the multipole field with a higher pole number than the quadrupole can stabilize the plasma without degradation of the particle confinement.
