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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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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Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
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.
