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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.
H. Gota et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | May 2013 | Pages 139-142
doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A16890
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A high temperature, stable, long-lived field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasma state has been produced in the C-2 device by dynamically colliding and merging two oppositely directed compact toroids, with combining effects of biasing edge plasma near the FRC separatrix from an end-plasma-gun with magnetic-mirror-plugs and of neutral-beam (NB) injection. The plasma-gun creates an inward radial electric field which mitigates the n = 2 rotational instability. The gun also produces E×B velocity shear in the FRC edge layer, which may explain observations of improved transport properties. The FRCs are nearly axisymmetric which enables fast ion confinement, and increasing NB power input clearly extends the FRC lifetime. The combined effects of the plasma-gun with mirror-plugs and of NB injection yield a new High Performance FRC regime with confinement times improved by factors 2 to 4 and FRC lifetimes extended from 1 to 3 ms.