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Conference Spotlight
2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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!
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Star Trek or Planet of the Apes?
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
These days, the ship of civil nuclear technology we are all aboard is sailing through a turbulent passage. The winds and currents are favorable, but there are swells ahead: steep energy-demand projections, buoyant equity valuations, splashy announcements, a generational realignment of nuclear policies and institutional norms.
Part of the reason we chose “Building the Nuclear Century” as the theme for this year’s Winter Conference was to put some ballast in the hull of the nuclear conversation.
Advanced nuclear fission and fusion energy development are accelerating, both here and around the world. And yet, at least in the U.S., we are still years away from connecting commercial Gen IV systems to our grid.
In a world growing increasingly impatient, how do we stay on task and deliver? There are three ingredients to success.
G. M. Wallace, T. Bohm, C. E. Kessel
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 159-171
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1858672
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Fusion Nuclear Science Facility (FNSF) is a proposed tokamak reactor with the mission to investigate operation of a fusion reactor in a nuclear environment. The high neutron fluence component of the FNSF mission requires steady-state operation for extremely long pulses (months) at full power. Plasma sustainment and current drive will be critical components of a successful FNSF. COMSOL Multiphysics® software is used for combined radiofrequency (RF) and thermal simulations of the lower hybrid current drive antenna system. These simulations consider the resistive RF losses in the antenna including realistic surface roughness and a range of potential materials. The thermal analysis adds volumetric nuclear heating, plasma heat flux on leading edges, and electromagnetic radiation from the plasma to the RF heating calculated by COMSOL. Additional neutronics calculations have been performed to determine the impact of these antenna designs on activated waste disposal for the materials considered. The simulations show that it is technically feasible to implement a fully active multijunction (FAM) rather than a passive-active multijunction (PAM) style of antenna if the septum between adjacent waveguides is sufficiently wide and the thermal conductivity of the structural material is sufficiently high. The FAM has the benefit of higher achievable power density with respect to the PAM, which results in a more compact antenna with potentially lower impact on neutron shielding and tritium breeding. These considerations point to tungsten rather than steel as the preferred structural material in constructing the antenna.