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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
F. Castejón, A. Cappa, M. Tereshchenko, S. S. Pavlov, A. Fernández
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 2 | August 2007 | Pages 230-239
Technical Paper | Electron Cyclotron Wave Physics, Technology, and Applications - Part 1 | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1502
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The relativistic effects on electron Bernstein wave (EBW) heating of plasmas confined in the TJ-II stellarator are presented in this work. The Ordinary-eXtraordinary-Bernstein mode conversion at the fundamental electron cyclotron harmonic (f = 28 GHz for the TJ-II central magnetic field) is chosen as the scenario for these estimates. This heating scheme presents high absorbed power for central densities above 1.2 × 1019 m-3 and has no upper density limit. Relativistic and nonrelativistic calculations have been performed using the TRUBA beam/ray-tracing code. For this purpose, the weakly relativistic dispersion relation valid for any values of the parallel and perpendicular refractive indexes, thus suitable for EBW, has been obtained. This dispersion relation has been introduced in TRUBA to estimate the ray trajectories and the power absorption to all orders of Larmor radius in the weakly relativistic regime. The result of our comparison is that the relativistic effects are not negligible and must be taken into account both on the ray trajectories and in the power absorption estimations. We also show that the relativistic absorption coefficient is lower than the nonrelativistic one, for the values of parallel refractive index that happen in TJ-II, and the power deposition profile is more centered.
