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Fusion Science and Technology
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Reimagining nuclear materials for the future of medicine
Nuclear medicine has come a long way since Henri Becquerel first observed the penetrating energy of radioactive materials in 1896. Today, technetium-99m alone is used in more than 40 million diagnostic procedures every year—from cardiovascular imaging and bone scans to cancer detection—making it the undisputed workhorse of nuclear medicine. That single statistic tells you something important: An enormous portion of modern diagnostic medicine rests on a surprisingly narrow foundation, one built around a small number of aging research reactors that were never originally designed for continuous isotope production.
B. Ploeckl, P. T. Lang, M. Kircher, A. Bock, A. Gude, F. Janky, B. Sieglin, W. Suttrop, W. Treutterer, T. Zehetbauer, the ASDEX Upgrade Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 3 | April 2021 | Pages 199-205
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1864172
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Reactor plasma core fueling requires the injection of cryogenic pellets, most probably composed of a mixture of D2 and T2. Likely, pellet injection will be the most important actuator for plasma core density control. Therefore, pellet injection systems must be developed further that are capable of acting as actuator for density control. A novel control scheme is developed based on a centrifuge acceleration system. This scheme considers every available pellet launching slot and compares the current particle flux with the requested one. The response time is within the granularity of the available launching slots, in this case between 7 and 12 ms. First plasma experiments in feedforward mode showed excellent results, providing a good basis for upcoming plasma core density feedback control development activities.