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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
Meeting Spotlight
Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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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Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
A more open future for nuclear research
A growing number of institutional, national, and funder mandates are requiring researchers to make their published work immediately publicly accessible, through either open repositories or open access (OA) publications. In addition, both private and public funders are developing policies, such as those from the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the European Commission, that ask researchers to make publicly available at the time of publication as much of their underlying data and other materials as possible. These, combined with movement in the scientific community toward embracing open science principles (seen, for example, in the dramatic rise of preprint servers like arXiv), demonstrate a need for a different kind of publishing outlet.
D. A. Spong
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 3 | October 2006 | Pages 343-351
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1255
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent stellarator optimization efforts have targeted transport measures such as quasi-symmetry, effective ripple, and alignment of particle guiding center orbits with flux surfaces. This has resulted in significant reductions in neoclassical losses so that, at least for near-term experiments, the neoclassical transport of particles and energy can be made small compared to anomalous transport. However, momentum transport properties within magnetic flux surfaces provide an additional dimension for characterizing optimized stellarators. The momentum and flow damping features of optimized stellarators can vary widely, depending on their magnetic structure, ranging from systems with near-tokamak-like properties where toroidal flows dominate to those in which poloidal flows dominate and toroidal flows are suppressed. A set of tools has been developed for self-consistently evaluating the flow characteristics of different stellarators. Application of this model to existing and planned devices indicates that plasma flow properties vary significantly. Comparisons across devices can aid in unfolding the interplay between anomalous and neoclassical damping effects as well as the impact of momentum transport properties on related plasma phenomena such as turbulence suppression, shielding of resonant magnetic error fields, and impurity transport.