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ANS Student Conference 2025
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Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Uncertainty contributes to lowest uranium spot prices in 18 months
A combination of plentiful supply and uncertain demand resulted in spot pricing for uranium closing out March below $64 per pound, with dips down to about $63.50 during mid-March—the lowest futures prices in 18 months, according to tracking by analysis firm Trading Economics. Spot prices have also fallen steadily since the beginning of 2024. Meanwhile, long-term prices have held steady at about $80 per pound at the end of March, according to Canadian front-end uranium mining, milling, and conversion company Cameco.
Pu Tu, Weichao Xie, Qian Chen, Chen Huang, Jinxia Zhu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 5 | July 2023 | Pages 553-566
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2151821
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Non-resonant excitation due to plasma inertia may be dominant in inducing internal kink (IK) instabilities. Poloidal rotation can effectively modify plasma inertia and cause non-resonant excitation to occur. An extended dispersion relation including poloidal rotation is established to study the IK mode and the fishbone (FB) mode. It is found that in rotating plasmas, even for a stable IK mode (i.e., the perturbed potential energy of background plasma δWc is positive) and in the absence of energetic particles (EPs), poloidal rotation can drive the IK mode via non-resonant excitation. Moreover, the IK mode is easy to be driven by poloidal rotation in weak magnetic shear plasmas. Similar to toroidal rotation, when poloidal rotation frequency exceeds a threshold, the FB mode can transform into a branch of a non-resonant mode. The real frequency of the mode, being independent of the precessional frequency of EPs, is just equal to the poloidal rotation frequency. Thus, the non-resonant mode is characterized by the long-lived mode (LLM) observed in toroidal rotating plasmas. The critical gradient of the poloidal rotation profile plays a crucial role in causing the resonant mode to evolve into a non-resonant one; for instance, only for a very peaked poloidal rotation profile can the FB mode transform into the LLM. In addition, the diamagnetic drift frequency of thermal ions can stabilize the FB and the IK modes.
