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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Y. Yasaka et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 1-8
Technical Paper | Seventh International Conference on Open Magnetic Systems for Plasma Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A6974
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A direct energy converter (DEC) designed for thermal ions escaping from a fusion reactor consists of a cusp magnetic field and one-or two-stage decelerating electrodes. In this CUSPDEC, magnetized electrons are deflected along the field lines of the cusp magnetic field to the line cusp region and collected by an electron collector, while weakly magnetized ions can traverse the separatrix and enter into the point cusp region. Thus, ions are separated from electrons, and flow into an ion collector to produce DC power. A normal cusp magnetic field enables us to separate electrons and ions for low energy electrons from a test plasma source, but not for electrons with much higher energies from the tandem mirror GAMMA10. The reason for this is found that the high energy electrons do not follow the field lines due to a high potential applied to the ion collector for ion deceleration. Use of a slanted cusp field has resolved the difficulty resulting in good separation. The efficiency of energy conversion of separated ions with wide spread in energy is ~55 % for a one-stage decelerating electrode. An additional lateral electrode, together with the existing collector, constitutes a two-stage ion collector that provides distributed ion-decelerating fields. The system has revealed improvement in efficiency. From the measured voltage-current characteristics, the efficiency of this two-stage collector is estimated to have a value of 65-70 % at an optimum condition.