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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Strontium: Supply-and-demand success for the DOE’s Isotope Program
The Department of Energy’s Isotope Program (DOE IP) announced last week that it would end its “active standby” capability for strontium-82 production about two decades after beginning production of the isotope for cardiac diagnostic imaging. The DOE IP is celebrating commercialization of the Sr-82 supply chain as “a success story for both industry and the DOE IP.” Now that the Sr-82 market is commercially viable, the DOE IP and its National Isotope Development Center can “reassign those dedicated radioisotope production capacities to other mission needs”—including Sr-89.
Yasushi Ono
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 27 | Number 3 | April 1995 | Pages 369-373
Compact Torus (Field-Reversed Configuration, Spheromak) Concepts | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A11947108
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel slow formation method of field-reversed configuration (FRC) has been developed by magnetic reconnection of two force-free spheromaks with opposite toroidal magnetic field. The merging process cancels their opposite magnetic helicities, realizing a non-Taylor relaxation from the force-free state to the high-β FRC state with zero helicity. A significant increase in the ion temperature has been documented up to 180eV during this fully anti-parallel reconnection. The dissipated toroidal magnetic energy of the merging toroids is transformed mostly to the ion thermal energy, revealing a unique relaxation mechanism to the high-β equilibrium. The merging toroids are found to relax either to an FRC or to a new spheromak, depending on whether their total helicity is larger or smaller than a critical value.