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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.
Mofreh R. Zaghloul
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 2 | September 2003 | Pages 338-343
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Chamber Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A357
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A model for the ionization equilibrium of weakly non-ideal Flibe plasma is presented in terms of a set of coupled nonlinear Saha equations supplemented by electro-neutrality and conservation of nuclei. Non-ideality effects have been taken into account in terms of lowering of the ionization potentials and truncated partition functions. A simple formulation and solution strategy of the Saha equations for the single element case has been extended to apply for the case of plasma mixtures and has been used to calculate the composition of partially ionized Flibe plasma over a wide range of temperatures and densities. A criterion for the validity of the assumption of local thermodynamic equilibrium is presented and applied to the result. Effects of non-ideality corrections and approximating the partition function to the statistical weight of the ground state have been quantified and presented.