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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.
D. Ducret, C. Laquerbe, A. Ballanger, J. Steimetz, V. Porri, J.P. Verdin, T. Pelletier
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 1092-1096
Isotope Separation | Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology Tsukuba, Japan November 12-16, 2001 | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A22752
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The separation of hydrogen isotopes is an essential element for tritium processing systems. A new process invented at the Savannah River Site, has been developed at Valduc facility: Thermal Cycling Absorption Process. This system uses palladium packed in a column to absorb a stream of hydrogen isotopes. By repeated heating and cooling cycles, the hydrogen isotopes successively desorb into a capacity and go back onto the column. The thermal cycling creates differences in the Pd separation factor for the hydrogen isotopes inducing the concentration of tritium at one end of the column and the concentration of the lighter isotopes at the other end. This paper presents experimental results obtained with a full-scale facility which has been installed in a glovebox so as to treat weakly tritiated gases. Experimental data collected on this device working with several isotopic mixtures are presented and compared to simulation results.