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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.
Yuri Igitkhanov, Boris Bazylev
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 349-353
Materials Development & Plasma-Material Interactions | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12378
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have estimated the energy deposition of runaway electrons into the tungsten/EUROFER blanket structure for reactor DEMO conditions and calculated the consequent level of thermal erosion. Our simulations indicate that the heat generated by runaway electrons may pose a major lifetime limitation for the W armor. We find that the minimum thickness of W necessary to prevent EUROFER from stress destruction at high temperatures, min, could be already too large for an efficient cooling. Tungsten layers of thickness min would erode by surface melting and vaporization since the thermal conductivity time is much larger than expected exposure time to runaways.