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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.
Motonori Komura, Kaori Kamata, Tomokazu Iyoda, Keiji Nagai
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 257-264
Technical Paper | Selected papers from 20th Target Fabrication Meeting, May 20-24, 2012, Santa Fe, NM, Guest Editor: Robert C. Cook | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A16347
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Highly ordered nanopore arrays were successfully fabricated using poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) and polymethacrylate with azobenzene mesogen in side chains [PMA(Az)] block copolymer film based on irradiation of 172-nm vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) light. The block copolymer forms a highly ordered microphase-separated film with perpendicularly oriented PEO cylinders just by thermal annealing through a self-assembling process. We found that the etching rate of the PEO homopolymer was much higher than that of the PMA(Az) homopolymer at a chamber pressure of 102 Pa of atmosphere under VUV irradiation. The etching rate of the PEO component in the two systems of microphase separation and macrophase separation of the homopolymer blend crucially depended on the feature size of phase separation. In the PEO selective etching process of the block copolymer film, the water-contact angle of the film dramatically increased due to elimination of hydrophilic PEO. The resulting nanopore array film will be useful for low-density target materials.