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Reactor Physics
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Industry Update—April 2025
Here is a recap of industry happenings from the recent past:
Texas universities evaluating SMRs for water desalination
Natura Resources has signed a memorandum of understanding with two Texas universities—Texas Tech University and Abilene Christian University—to evaluate the integration of the company’s molten salt small modular reactor technology with water desalination systems. The collaboration includes Texas Tech’s Texas Produced Water Consortium, which was established by the Texas legislature in 2021 to explore the potential benefits of using treated produced water for purposes outside of the oil and gas industry of the Permian Basin. Produced water is salty or brackish hydrocarbon-containing water that is produced as a byproduct of oil and gas extraction. The stated goal of the new collaboration is to develop “a sustainable solution for water scarcity by purifying produced water from oil and gas operations, making it available for agricultural and other beneficial uses.” Abilene Christian University is planning to host the first deployment of Natura Resources’ Natura MSR-1, a 1-MWt molten salt research reactor.
R. Koch
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 49 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 177-186
Technical Paper | Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics - Plasma Heating and Current Drive | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1117
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This lecture complements the three previous lectures (Refs. 1, 2, and 3) on waves by addressing, on the basis of elementary and intuitive treatment, the process of coupling of electromagnetic power to plasma. Coupling is here meant in a broad sense. It consists of four different steps. (i) The first one is the coupling of vacuum electromagnetic power to plasma waves. An elementary antenna coupling theory is given. The state of the art in coupling models and status of comparisons with experiments are briefly discussed. (ii) The second is the transfer of plasma wave energy to particle energy. The resonant processes leading to this transfer are described in a heuristic way. (iii) The third one is the build-up of fast particle populations. It will be outlined through a sketch of quasilinear diffusion for the simple case of Landau damping. (iv) The last step is the conversion of power through the resonant particle population to bulk plasma heating by collisions, which will be briefly addressed.
