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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
V. I. Volosov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 59 | Number 1 | January 2011 | Pages 214-216
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A11613
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Publications considered a project of aneutronic reactor (the P11B reaction) based on the asymmetric centrifugal trap (ACT), the energy of protons and alpha particles leaving the reactor subjected to direct transformation to electrical energy.These works considered a project of such a reactor under some simplifying assumptions. The most significant of them is that of the scheme of the intermediate Be nucleus decay into 2 alpha particles through the ground state, which determined the energy spectrum of these particles. However, there are two channels of decay of this nucleus in this reaction, i.e., through the ground state of Be and through its excited state, see Fig. 1. It can be seen from calculation in that the probability that the reaction goes through the excited state is two orders higher than the ground state variant.It significantly changes the shape of the energy spectrum of alpha particles and makes it necessary to somehow change the scheme of their energy recovery in this project, the scheme of realization of the main process (the P11B reaction) remaining unchanged.