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Fusion Science and Technology
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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
E. Mazzucato
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 3 | April 2021 | Pages 173-179
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1858673
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
With the goal of reducing the radiation damage and radioactive waste that will occur in a tokamak reactor using the deuterium-tritium cycle, this paper proposes a new magnetic scheme capable of confining hot and dense deuterium–helium3 plasmas. It consists of two 200-m-long cylindrical plasmas connected by semicircular sections to form a racetrack configuration. The reactor should be capable of producing from 7.8 to 13 GW of fusion power when operating at electron densities of 2 × 1020 m−3, temperature 40 keV, and density ratios of the two reactants from 1:2 to 2:1.