ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Jul 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2025
Nuclear Technology
August 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Deep geologic repository progress—2025 Update
Editor's note: This article has was originally published in November 2023. It has been updated with new information as of June 2025.
Outside my office, there is a display case filled with rock samples from all over the world. It contains a disk of translucent, orange salt from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; a core of white-and-bronze gneiss from the site of the future deep geologic repository in Eurajoki, Finland; several angular chunks of fine-grained, gray claystone from the underground research laboratory at Bure, France; and a piece of coarse-grained granite from the underground research tunnel in Daejeon, South Korea.
Weston M. Stacey
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 109-118
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1851631
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fusion alpha heating introduces new phenomena into plasma dynamics and control. On the worrisome side is the well-known fact that the dependence of the predominantly central fusion heating mechanism, coupled with the less appreciated fact of the predominantly plasma edge location of bremsstrahlung and impurity line and recombination radiation cooling and of ion orbit loss cooling, suggests the possibility of a thermal runaway fusion power excursion in the plasma core. On the encouraging side is the fact that the fusion alpha energy is transferred first to heat the core electrons and produce electron cyclotron radiation that is transferred instantaneously, predominantly to outer plasma regions and the surrounding material wall, reducing its availability for further heating of core plasma ions. This paper discusses the temporal and spatial dependence of the various heating and cooling mechanisms involved in the burn dynamics of a fusion plasma, introduces a spatially coarse nodal space-time calculation model (suitable for dynamics and controller calculations) for the analysis of burning plasmas, and identifies the research needed to fully evaluate the parameters of such a model.