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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.R. Cohn, L. Bromberg, R.J. Leclaire, R.E. Potok, D.L. Jassby
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 10 | Number 3 | November 1986 | Pages 1111-1116
Nuclear Technology Experiments and Facilities | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24881
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We discuss a super high field mode of tokamak operation that uses ohmic heating or near ohmic heating to ignition. This approach could also provide high values of nτe, increasing the margin of ignition in deuterium-tritium plasmas, and opening up the possibility of some type of advanced fuel operation. D-He3 operation might be possible if high enough values of β (β ≃ .09) can be obtained. The super high field mode of operation uses very high values of B2a, where B is the magnetic field and o is the minor radius (B2a > 100 T2m). We analyze copper magnet devices with major radii from 1.7 to 3.0 meters. Minimizing or eliminating the need for auxiliary heating has the potential advantages of reducing uncertainty in extrapolating the energy confinement time of current tokamak devices, and reducing engineering problems associated with large auxiliary heating requirements. It may be possible to heat relatively short pulse, inertially cooled tokamaks to ignition with ohmic power alone. However, there may be advantages in using a very small amount of auxiliary power (less than the ohmic heating power) to boost the ohmic heating and provide a faster start-up, especially in relatively compact devices.