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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.
J. Reece Roth
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 258-263
Alternate Fuels | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22878
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A survey of large scale DT tokamak design studies shows that the confinement time required to achieve self-sustaining operation can be much less than that predicted by the recently reported neo-Alcator scaling. The excess containment is, in most cases, more than an order of magnitude larger than that required for a steady-state burning plasma. If neo-Alcator sealing remained valid to reactor conditions, means must be found to reduce confinement times to levels consistent with steady-state operation. The problem of excess confinement has not been addressed adequately in the available literature. A positive aspect is that this excess confinement is likely to be available without engineering or physics penalty. A constructive use to which this excess confinement can be put is to burn advanced fusion fuels instead of the DT reaction, and thereby reap the practical benefits of reduced energetic neutron fluxes.