ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
J.H. Schultz, D.B. Montgomery
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 1019-1024
Next-Generation Devices | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22992
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Alcator DCT is an experimental tokamak proposed to be built at M.I.T. It features extremely long pulses, RF heating and current drive, and an all superconducting magnet system. The toroidal magnets produce a field on-axis of 7 T, permitting current drive at high density and ion heating with existing power supplies. The device is designed to maximize the use of existing facilities at M.I.T. in order to build a machine large enough for simultaneous heating and current drive at low cost. This report concentrates on a design option with 24 circular toroidal field (TF) magnets, which represents the second iteration in the conceptual design of this machine. This design is a modification of the HESTER concept developed by the authors1, The DCT design is an advance over the HESTER design, in that it has adequate horizontal port space for human access and for tangential viewing of the plasma at the geometric center. This was achieved by decreasing the number of TF coils from 36 to 24. increasing the magnet bore from 52 to 62 em and shaving diagonals from noncritical areas of the case in the lead and header region. Recent perceptions of the requirements of the tokamak program in the areas of impurity control and in-vessel component screening indicate that a third significant iteration of the DCT concept is necessary. The Alcator DCT uses pumped limiters for long term impurity control. Doubts about the efficacy of pumped limiters and a desire to concentrate on long-term impurity control issues led to the recommendation that DCT be modified to include expanded boundary and simplified poloidal divertor operation. Early work on these options is described briefly.