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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.
Qing Zhang, Peiyun Shi, Ming Liu, Munan Lin, Xuan Sun
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 50-55
Technical Paper | Open Magnetic Systems 2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-866
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An electrode biasing system has been installed on the KMAX (Keda Mirror with AXisymmetricity) tandem mirror machine to control the rotation speed. It consists of a metal disk-type electrode and a concentric ring-shaped electrode. On each of them are 12 embedded single probes distributed uniformly in the azimuthal direction plus a single probe on the center. An adjustable power supply provides the biasing voltage from −1 kV to 1 kV, and a silicon controlled rectifier with rising time ~5 μs and maximum current up to 3000 A is used to switch on the circuit. While most of applied voltages are inevitably lost on the sheath as confirmed by the experiments, the plasma potentials have been found to change substantially.