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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.
K. Lackner
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 4 | November 2008 | Pages 989-993
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1914
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To measure the reactor relevance of existing and planned confinement devices, we propose Bta5/4 and Pheata3/4 as dimensionless engineering parameters. These quantities - together with a density parameter that can be written as na3/4/Bt - have to be conserved in plasma physics identity experiments on different-size devices to respect the so-called Kadomtsev similarity constraints. They offer also a coordinate system to map the approach to the reactor regime. Theoretical and semiempirical models can be used in this coordinate space to produce isocontours for different dimensionless physics quantities, like the usual parameters *, *, and , but also for the intensity of collisional coupling, the excess of heating power over the L-H transition threshold, and the ratio of current redistribution to energy confinement time to visualize the distance to the regime of a fusion reactor.