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Chernobyl at 40 years: Looking back at Nuclear News
Sunday, April 26, at 1:23 a.m. local time will mark 40 years since the most severe nuclear accident in history: the meltdown of Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.
In the ensuing four decades, countless books, documentaries, articles, and conference sessions have examined Chernobyl’s history and impact from various angles. There is a similar abundance of outlooks in the archives of Nuclear News, where hundreds of scientists, advocates, critics, and politicians have shared their thoughts on Chernobyl over the years. Today, we will take a look at some highlights from the pages of NN to see how the story of Chernobyl evolved over the decades.
Karl H. Spatschek
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 2 | March 2002 | Pages 119-134
Kinetic Theory | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A11963509
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The statistical description of a hot, magnetized, classical plasma is reviewed. The latter represents the appropriate model for a fusion plasma in magnetic confinement. Various approaches are presented. We start with the Fokker-Planck equation for Langevin dynamics. It is shown that also a deterministic model leads to characteristic non-equilibrium behaviors in the so called kinetic regime. The Boltzmann equation for dilute gases is presented, and the differences between the kinetic and the hydrodynamic regimes are worked out. In the main part, the consequences of long-range Coulomb interactions are demonstrated. Several plasma-kinetic equations, like for instance the Balescu-Lenard equation, are discussed. Physical consequences from the linearization of the kinetic equations, e.g. collision frequencies and Landau damping, are elucidated. In the final part of the paper the specific reformulations in magnetized plasmas are investigated. The drift-kinetic and the gyrokinetic approaches are presented. The paper is concluded by an outlook on often used truncations.