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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
Standards Program
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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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
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.
