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Playing the “bad guy” to enhance next-generation safety
Sometimes, cops and robbers is more than just a kid’s game. At the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, researchers are channeling their inner saboteurs to discover vulnerabilities in next-generation nuclear reactors, making sure that they’re as safe as possible before they’re even constructed.
Tetsuya Nishi, Kei Yoneda, Kai Masuda, Kiyoshi Yoshikawa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 1061-1065
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering and Diagnostics | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1636
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A 21S metastable helium atomic beam injector was studied for a beam probe of electric field diagnoses, which is applicable to high electric potential region in Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion (IECF) plasmas where a solid probe can hardly be utilized. With deuterium background gas (~0.1Pa) which is the minimum operation pressure of the IECF devices, the beam density was found to decrease ten times lower than beam density without background gas because of collisional effect. Also, plasma parameters in a-magnetron-discharge-based exciter were evaluated by means of Langmuir probe and emission spectroscopy. These results strongly imply a high excitation rate of ~10-4 into 21S metastable state.