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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.
M. J. Pattison, S. Smolentsev, R. Munipalli, M. A. Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 809-813
Computational Tools, Modeling & Validation | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-309
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a Dual-Coolant Lead-Lithium (DCLL) blanket, tritium losses from the PbLi into cooling helium streams may occur when the liquid-metal breeder is moving in the poloidal ducts. Quantitative analysis of the mass transfer processes associated with the tritium transport in the breeder as well as tritium diffusion through the structural and functional materials is important for two main reasons. The first is that there can be a substantial cost in extracting tritium from helium. The second is that tritium can make its way from the helium stream into the environment. In the present study, we analyze tritium transport in the front section of the DCLL DEMO-type Outboard blanket, where PbLi moves poloidally in a rectangular duct with an insulating flow channel insert (FCI) in the presence of a strong plasma-confining magnetic field. This involves two steps, the computation of the flow field with an MHD code, followed by the solution of the mass transfer equation with a newly-developed transport code CATRYS. The analyses included a sensitivity study to investigate how uncertainties in the properties of the materials (diffusion coefficient, solubility constant) affect the results and to assess the effect of an impervious crystalline sealing layer on the FCI.