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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.
Yong Hu, H. G. Yang, W. W. Zhao, Q. Zhan, X. M. Yuan, TMT Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1531-1534
Interaction with Materials | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12724
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experiments on deuterium permeation through S.S.316L with FeAl/Al2O3 composite coating have been performed in the temperature range 277-600°C at driving pressures 1-50kPa. As comparison, the tests for samples with natural oxidation film and Ni-plating have also been performed. The apparent deuterium permeability in the sample with FeAl/Al2O3 coating is an order of magnitude lower than that with natural oxide layer, and is at least three orders of magnitude lower than that in the non-oxidized material by inference. The apparent activation energy of deuterium permeation is 76.6kJ/mol for the coated sample and 61.3kJ/mol for the sample with natural oxidation film. The exponential dependences of steady flux for the samples on the pressure are 0.89 for FeAl/Al2O3 coating, 0.65 for natural oxidation film, and 0.55 for Ni-plating, that reflects different permeation mechanism for various surfaces. In addition, the trapping effect of defects on hydrogen isotope was inferred according to the different characteristic of permeation flux curves for various samples.