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DTRA’s advancements in nuclear and radiological detection
A new, more complex nuclear age has begun. Echoing the tensions of the Cold War amid rapidly evolving nuclear and radiological threats, preparedness in the modern age is a contest of scientific innovation. The Research and Development Directorate (RD) at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) is charged with winning this contest.
Vít Škvára, Václav Šmídl, Tomáš Pevný, Jakub Seidl, Aleš Havránek, David Tskhakaya
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 8 | November 2020 | Pages 962-971
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1820805
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Chirping Alfvén eigenmodes were observed at the COMPASS tokamak. They are believed to be driven by runaway electrons (REs), and as such, they provide a unique opportunity to study the physics of nonlinear interaction between REs and electromagnetic instabilities, including important topics of RE mitigation and losses. On COMPASS, they can be detected from spectrograms of certain magnetic probes. So far, their detection has required much manual effort since they occur rarely. We strive to automate this process using machine learning techniques based on generative neural networks. We present two different models that are trained using a smaller, manually labeled database and a larger unlabeled database from COMPASS experiments. In a number of experiments, we demonstrate that our approach is a viable option for automated detection of rare instabilities in tokamak plasma.