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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
R. Keppens, J. W. S. Blokland
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 131-138
Technical Paper | Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics - Equilibrium and Instabilities | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1112
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear fusion research promises to harvest the excess energy carried by energetic neutrons when Deuterium and Tritium hydrogen isotopes are fused together to form -particles. Pressure and density conditions needed for these fusion reactions ensure that these charged constituents, together with the free electrons, form a fully ionized plasma at temperatures of about 100 million Kelvin. Any contact with material walls would instantaneously cool the plasma and must be avoided. In the axisymmetric toroidal vessel of a tokamak, a hot plasma is confined primarily by magnetic Lorentz forces. Strong helical magnetic fields that trace out nested toroidal surfaces help to thermally insulate the plasma from the walls and support it against its own pressure gradient. To lowest order, a fluid model of the equilibrium considers only this force balance in the poloidal cross-section of the tokamak, as expressed analytically by the Grad-Shafranov equation.