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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.
L. P. Ku, P. R. Garabedian
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 207-215
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1237
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have identified and developed new classes of quasi-axially symmetric configurations that have attractive properties from the standpoint of both near-term physics experiments and long-term power-producing reactors. These include configurations with very small aspect ratios (~2.5) having superior quasi-symmetry and energetic particle confinement characteristics, and configurations with strongly negative global magnetic shear from the shaping fields so that the overall rotational transform, when combined with the transform from bootstrap currents at finite plasma pressures, will have a small but positive shear, making the avoidance of low-order rational surfaces at a given operating beta possible. Additionally, we have found configurations with National Compact Stellarator Experiment-like characteristics but with the biased components in the magnetic spectrum that allow us to improve the confinement of energetic particles. For each new class of configurations, we have also designed coils to ensure that the new configurations are realizable and engineering-wise feasible. The coil designs typically have the properties of R/min(C-P) 6 and R/min(C-C) 10, where R is the plasma major radius and min(C-P) and min(C-C) are the minimum coil-to-plasma and coil-to-coil separations, respectively. These coil properties allow power-producing reactors to be designed with R < 9 m for deuterium-tritium plasmas with a full breeding blanket. The good quasi-axisymmetry limits the energy loss of alpha particles to below 10%.