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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.
J. P. Goedbloed
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 2 | March 2004 | Pages 79-84
Technical Paper | Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics - Equilibrium and Instabilities | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A471
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The task of the theory of tokamak equilibrium is to determine the global magnetic confinement topology and physical characteristics of the underlying basic equilibrium state, which is assumed to be static (both [partial derivative]/[partial derivative]t = 0 and background velocity v0 = 0). This could be considered to be the most boring case of plasma behavior, viz. total absence of dynamics: a corresponding fluid dynamics problem hardly exists. The reason for our interest in this plasma state is the prospect of obtaining clean, abundant, and cheap energy from controlled thermonuclear fusion reactions. Of course, criticism and doubt immediately enter the mind after a statement like this. Nevertheless, let us study this plasma state, leaving questions like 'is there such a state at all?' and 'is it actually so desirable?' for later (Sec. 5).