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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
M. Ferrara, I. H. Hutchinson, S. M. Wolfe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 4 | November 2009 | Pages 1476-1488
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9251
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The main sources of noise and pickups in Alcator C-Mod are identified, and their effects on the measurement and control of the vertical position are evaluated. Broadband noise may affect controllability of C-Mod plasmas at limit elongations and may become an issue with high-order controllers; therefore, two applications of Kalman filters are investigated. A Kalman filter is compared to a state observer based on the pseudoinverse of the measurement matrix and proves to be a better candidate for state reconstruction for vertical stabilization, provided adequate models of the system, the inputs, the process, and measurement noise and an adequate set of diagnostic measurements are available. A single-input single-output application of the filter for the vertical observer rejects high-frequency noise without destabilizing high-elongation plasmas.