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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.
Yoshi Hirooka, Robert W. Conn, Monali J. Khandagle, Gaetan Chevalier, Toshiaki Sogabe, Teruo Matsuda, Hiroaki Ogura, Hirotaka Toyoda, Hideo Sugai
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 4 | July 1991 | Pages 2059-2069
Technical Paper | Carbon Material Special | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29340
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Newly developed bulk-boronized graphites and boronized carbon-carbon composites, with a total boron concentration ranging from 3 to 30 wt%, have been bombarded with steady-state deuterium plasmas at temperatures between 200 and 1600°C in the PISCES-B facility. The erosion yield of bulk-boronized graphite is smaller than that of pyrolytic graphite by a factor of 2 to 3 in regimes of chemical sputtering, physical sputtering, and radiation-enhanced sublimation (RES). Plasma bombardment at elevated temperatures does not noticeably alter the near-surface composition of bulk-boronized graphite. A chemical pinning effect of boron on the migration of interstitial carbon atoms is the key to the reduction of erosion due to RES. Post-bombardment thermal desorption spectroscopy indicates that bulk boronization enhances recombinative desorption of deuterium. The enhanced deuterium desorption is responsible for the suppressed chemical sputtering. Deuterium retention in bulk-boronized graphite at temperatures from room temperature to 800°C has been measured, and it is maximized at temperatures around 300°C. The maximized deuterium retention increases by a factor of 2 as the boron concentration changes from 0 to 90%.