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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.
Yu. Igitkhanov, E. Polunovsky, C. D. Beidler
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 268-275
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1245
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The stellarator impurity transport code has been developed to describe the evolution of the impurity concentration and convective and diffusive fluxes of different charge states in time and space for given background plasma profiles in nonaxisymmetric devices. An extended model of neoclassical transport coefficients obtained by benchmarking of various methods has been employed for calculation of the radial electric field and for description of impurity ions. Calculations were performed mainly for light impurity species for background plasma profiles in high-density long-pulse Large Helical Device (LHD) discharges with and without an externally induced island at the edge and for W7-AS discharges with low and high confinement. It is shown that in the frame of neoclassical theory, the forces due to the radial electric field, the temperature gradient (convective terms), and the density gradient (diffusive term) mainly determine the impurity dynamics and eventually, together with atomic processes, the radial distribution of each ionization stage. Calculations show that in LHD discharges a different sign of the electric field (measured in experiment) within the island ensures the effective pumping of impurities within the island and their screening from penetration into the bulk plasma. It is shown that in the frame of purely neoclassical theory, the retention of impurities at the plasma edge, seen in the high-density H-mode of operation in W7-AS, cannot be explained.