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Nuclear methods for screwworm eradication
Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced the launch of a coordinated research project focused on a nuclear technique that can tackle the reemergence of New World screwworm (NWS) in Central America, Mexico, and the United States.
N. W. Eidietis
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 7 | October-November 2021 | Pages 738-744
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1889919
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Disruptions present a great challenge to achieving an economically viable commercial tokamak fusion reactor. Disruption handling, including prevention, mitigation, and resilient design, must be incorporated into future reactor designs at the same priority as core performance and steady-state heat flux removal. Prevention requires avoiding unstable regimes; actively stabilizing instabilities if they do appear; or, if those steps should fail, terminating the plasma-controlled rampdown. Mitigation is a last resort that utilizes massive impurity injection to reduce a damaging concentration of thermal and mechanical loads. Extremely robust disruption prevention will be of paramount importance to ensure high duty factor and capital return on the reactor investment, but the reactor environment poses significant technical challenges exceeding those in ITER. The long-term mission of a commercial reactor motivates investment in passive resilient design to survive disruptions in the absence of active intervention.