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Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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2023 ANS Annual Meeting
June 11–14, 2023
Indianapolis, IN|Marriott Indianapolis Downtown
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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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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Vogtle-3 achieves full power output
The Vogtle expansion project’s Unit 3 reactor has attained 100 percent energy output—the first time it has reached its maximum expected output of approximately 1,100 MWe, Georgia Power announced yesterday.
Roman Rozenblat, Egemen Kolemen, Florian M. Laggner, Christopher Freeman, Greg Tchilinguirian, Paul Sichta, Gretchen Zimmer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 8 | November 2019 | Pages 835-840
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1658037
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Thomson scattering (TS) diagnostic on the National Spherical Tokamak eXperiment Upgrade (NSTX-U) has been an essential system for many operational campaigns due to its function of measuring plasma electron density and temperature. Constructive feedback to improve the next plasma discharge, however, has been limited because of in-between shots analysis. Plasma control, therefore, desires a diagnostic system that is real-time capable. This contribution presents the development of software that demonstrates the feasibility of a real-time TS diagnostic system for NSTX-U. The developed software is able to evaluate the electron temperature and density within 2.5 ms.
The overall system requirement is specified by a 60-Hz timing cycle, which is driven by the TS laser pulse rate. The real-time software processes the peak amplitudes of the detected photons, evaluates the electron temperature and density, and then outputs them to an analog output card that is used to interface with the NSTX-U control. The real-time software is implemented in an object-oriented architecture using C++11. C++11 software components include Abstract class, Atomic data types for synchronization, and a Hash data structure. The software application makes use of multiple threads that run concurrently: a thread to acquire the photon peak amplitude and feed a circular buffer, threads to evaluate the electron density and temperatures, and a thread that supplies corresponding output voltages and feeds the output card.
In summary, the new real-time TS system has been proven to meet the 60-Hz system requirement. For this reason, the software implementation was deemed successful. In future NSTX-U campaigns, this diagnostic will be a great asset enabling real-time plasma density and temperature control.
