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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.
Kazuhiro Kobayashi, Takumi Hayashi, Toshihiko Yamanishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 1041-1044
Contamination and Waste | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12594
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A fusion reactor requires high levels of safety and public acceptability, so safeconfinement of tritium is one of the key issues. Tritium must be well controlled with no excessive release to environment and no excessive workers exposure. Especially, the hot cell and tritium facility of ITER will use various construction materials such as the concrete and the organic materials. Since the concrete materials will be contaminated by tritium compared with the metal materials such as SS, it is very important to study the tritium behavior on the materials from the viewpoint of the excessive exposure protection to workers. Therefore, in order to understand the tritium behavior on the concrete materials, the sorption and desorption experiment was carried out as a function of the exposure time and temperature of water in the desorption experiment. The used samples were cement paste, mortar and concrete. These samples were exposed into 740 ~ 1110 Bq/cm3 of tritiated water vapor at room temperature. The exposed time was from a day to several weeks. The exposed samples for a certain period were soaked into water at 277 K, 298 K and 343 K, and then the water was periodically measured by Liquid Scintillation Counter (LSC) and the amount of tritium sorbed on the concrete materials were evaluated. The amount of the tritium sorbed in the concrete materials reached equilibrium less than 2 months. In the desorption behavior from concrete materials to water at 277K, 298K and 343K, the tritium sorbed in the concrete materials was desorbed about 99 % for 2 days at 343 K of water. However, the tritium desorption from concrete materials was sufficiently detected though 3 months passed. In addition, the tritium profile on the surface concrete materials was measured by a tritium imaging plate.