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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.
T. J. Renk, B. Williams, L. El-Guebaly, A. Jaber
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 570-578
IFE Design & Technology | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12444
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The level of energy deposition on future inertial fusion energy (IFE) reactor first walls, particularly in direct-drive scenarios, makes the ultimate survivability of such wall materials a challenge. We investigate the survivability of three-dimensional (3-D) dendritic materials fabricated by chemical vapor deposition (CVD), and exposed to repeated intense helium beam pulses on the RHEPP-1 facility at Sandia National Laboratories. Prior exposures of flat materials have led to what appears to be unacceptable mass loss on timescales insufficient for economical reactor operation. Two potential advantages of such dendritic materials are a) increased effective surface area, resulting in lowered fluences to most of the wall material surface, and b) improvement in materials properties for such micro-engineered metals compared to bulk processing. Several dendritic fabrications made with either tungsten and tungsten with rhenium show little or no morphology change after up to 800 pulses of 1 MeV helium at reactor-level thermal wall loading. Since the rhenium is added in a thin surface layer, its use does not appear to raise environmental concerns for fusion designs.