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Chernobyl at 40 years: Looking back at Nuclear News
Sunday, April 26, at 1:23 a.m. local time will mark 40 years since the most severe nuclear accident in history: the meltdown of Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.
In the ensuing four decades, countless books, documentaries, articles, and conference sessions have examined Chernobyl’s history and impact from various angles. There is a similar abundance of outlooks in the archives of Nuclear News, where hundreds of scientists, advocates, critics, and politicians have shared their thoughts on Chernobyl over the years. Today, we will take a look at some highlights from the pages of NN to see how the story of Chernobyl evolved over the decades.
D. D. Ryutov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 2 | March 2002 | Pages 88-91
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A204
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two problems related to alpha particle physics in magnetized target fusion (MTF) systems are briefly discussed. First, we evaluate the pressure and density of alpha particles under the assumption that they are perfectly confined and have a classical slowing-down distribution. It turns out that because of a comparatively low plasma temperature in MTF systems, the relative pressure and density of alpha particles are more than an order of magnitude less than in fusion reactors based on ITER-type tokamaks. Therefore, one may expect that even in the extreme case of a perfect confinement of alpha particles, their presence will have a much weaker (than in the case of tokamaks) effect on plasma stability and transport. Second, we discuss the kinetics of plasma burn under the opposite extreme assumption that all the alpha particles are instantaneously lost, without leaving any energy in a plasma. It turns out that even in this case, the plasma energy yield in batch-burn systems is only weakly affected by burnout effects.