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The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
B. Unterberg, U. Samm, M. Z. Tokar', A. M. Messiaen, J. Ongena, R. Jaspers
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 47 | Number 2 | February 2005 | Pages 187-201
Technical Paper | TEXTOR: Radiation Cooling and Confinement | doi.org/10.13182/FST05-A699
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The concept of a cold radiating plasma boundary has been proposed as a solution to the problem of power exhaust in magnetically confined fusion plasmas. We describe experiments to study the impact of the radiating impurities on transport processes in the plasma boundary and the plasma core in the tokamak TEXTOR.The injection of impurities (neon, silicon, or argon) leads to the formation of a radiating plasma boundary where up to 90% of the input power can be distributed to large wall areas, thereby strongly reducing the convective heat flux density onto the plasma-facing components. At high plasma densities the impurity seeding leads to a transition to an improved confinement state termed the radiative improved mode. This operational scenario combines high density and high confinement with power exhaust by radiation under quasi-stationary discharge conditions.The confinement improvement can be explained by a reduction of transport caused by the ion temperature gradient mode. This reduction is initiated by the impurity content and amplified by a characteristic steepening of the density profiles of the background plasma. The extrapolation of the results obtained in TEXTOR, based on experiments in larger devices, is discussed.