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Latest News
Cs-137 sealed source lost in Western Australia
A rendering of the sealed source capsule’s appearance. (Image: DFES)
Authorities are searching 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) of Australia’s Great Northern Highway, between Perth and the remote town of Newman, for a lost sealed-source capsule containing cesium-137. The source was part of a density gauge used by mining company Rio Tinto at its mining operations in Western Australia.
The Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) of Western Australia reported that the density gauge containing a 6-mm-diameter (0.24-inch-diameter) by 8-mm-height (0.31-inch-height) source capsule was sent by flatbed truck to Perth for repair, leaving Rio Tinto’s Gudai-Darri mine site in Western Australia on January 12 and arriving in Perth on January 16. The package containing the gauge, however, was not inspected until January 25.
Upon opening the package, it was found that the gauge was broken apart with one of four mounting bolts missing. The source itself and all screws on the gauge were also missing. It is assumed that vibrations from the truck broke the gauge apart and allowed the screws and capsule to fall through the bolt hole and away from the truck. DFES said they were notified of the loss on the evening of January 25.
M. Kostuk, T. D. Uram, T. Evans, D. M. Orlov, M. E. Papka, D. Schissel
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 74 | Number 1 | July-August 2018 | Pages 135-143
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1390388
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the first time, an automatically triggered, between-pulse fusion science analysis code was run on-demand at a remotely located supercomputer at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF, Lemont, Illinois) in support of in-process experiments being performed at DIII-D (San Diego, California). This represents a new paradigm for combining geographically distant experimental and high-performance computing facilities to provide enhanced data analysis that is quickly available to researchers. Enhanced analysis improves the understanding of the current pulse, translating into a more efficient use of experimental resources and quality of the resultant science. The analysis code used here, called SURFMN, calculates the magnetic structure of the plasma using Fourier transform. Increasing the number of Fourier components provides a more accurate determination of the stochastic boundary layer near the plasma edge by better resolving magnetic islands, but requires 26 min to complete using local DIII-D resources, putting it well outside the useful time range for between-pulse analysis. These islands relate to confinement and edge-localized mode suppression, and may be controlled by adjusting coil currents for the next pulse. ALCF has ensured on-demand execution of SURFMN by providing a reserved queue, a specialized service that launches the code after receiving an automatic trigger, and network access from the worker nodes for data transfer. Runs are executed on 252 cores of ALCF’s Cooley cluster and the data are available locally at DIII-D within 3 min of triggering. The original SURFMN design limits additional improvements with more cores; however, our work shows a path forward where codes that benefit from thousands of processors can run between pulses.