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2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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Perpetual Atomics, QSA Global produce Am fuel for nuclear space power
U.K.-based Perpetual Atomics and U.S.-based QSA Global claim to have achieved a major step forward in processing americium dioxide to fuel radioisotope power systems used in space missions. Using an industrially scalable process, the companies said they have turned americium into stable, large-scale ceramic pellets that can be directly integrated into sealed sources for radioisotope power systems, including radioisotope heater units (RHUs) and radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs).
Wayne A. Houlberg, Robert W. Conn
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 64 | Number 1 | September 1977 | Pages 141-150
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A27085
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Research on the development of numerical techniques to simulate the space-time evolution of large tokamak plasmas is reported. A nonuniform spatial mesh technique is employed to allow more accurate calculations in the boundary of reactor-size plasmas. A box integration method is used to maintain the accuracy of central differencing on the nonuniform spatial mesh and to preserve both the particle and energy flux. A variable implicit technique is used for the time expansion. The time-centered (Crank-Nicholson) technique used in most other models generally offers greater accuracy but can lead to severe limitations on the time step. Somewhat more implicit treatments can remove the numerical limitations on the time step without seriously affecting accuracy. The physical time scales, which can change by several orders of magnitude from startup to equilibrium, can then be used to continually adjust the time step throughout a calculation. Sample calculations are presented for a near-term tokamak engineering test reactor and a conceptual tokamak power reactor, UWMAK-III.