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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.
J. M. Lopez, J. Vega, S. Dormido-Canto, A. Murari, J. M. Ramirez, M. Ruiz, G. De Arcas, JET-EFDA Contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 26-33
Selected Paper from Seventh Fusion Data Validation Workshop 2012 (Part 3) | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-490
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Disruptions in tokamak devices are inevitable and can severely damage a tokamak device's wall. For this reason, different protection mechanisms have to be implemented. In the Joint European Torus (JET), these protection systems are structured in different levels. At the lowest level are those systems that are responsible for protecting the machine's integrity, which must be highly reliable. More complex systems are located at higher levels; these higher-level systems have been designed to take action before low-level systems. Since the installation of the new metallic wall in JET, new protection systems have been being developed to improve the overall protection of the device. This work focuses on a software application - a disruption predictor - that detects an incoming disruption. This software application simulates the behavior of a real-time implementation.In recent years, efforts have been devoted to developing and optimizing a reliable system that is capable of predicting disruptions. This has been accomplished by the novel combination of machine-learning techniques based on supervised learning methods. Disruptions must be predicted early enough so that the protection systems can mitigate the effects of disruptions. This paper summarizes the software development of the JET disruption predictor. This software simulates the real-time data acquisition and data processing. It has been an essential software tool to both optimize the disruption prediction model and implement a simulator of the real-time predictor.