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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.
Yasufumi Tanaka, Heun Tae Lee, Yoshio Ueda, Masayoshi Nagata, Yusuke Kikuchi, Satoshi Suzuki, Yohji Seki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 433-437
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-109
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, surface damaged W monoblocks (melting and cracking) by a pulsed plasma gun and an e-beam devices were exposed to cyclic heat loads (simulating normal heat loads and slow transients) and pulsed heat loads (simulating ELMs) to observe the effects of surface damage on surface erosion and heat removal capability. Heat load tests simulating the normal heat load (10 MW/m2, 10 sec, 300 cycles) and the slow transient (~20 MW/m2, 10 sec, 300 cycles) were performed by the e-beam. The surface morphology changes after the heat load tests were observed using laser scanning microscopy and FE-SEM. After e-beam irradiation of ~20 MW/m2, the longitudinal cracks crossing over entire monoblocks appeared on the surfaces of all monoblocks. Recrystallization and additional crack formation were also observed on the surface. However, there was no significant change of heat removal capability. In the additional pulsed heat load test, the energy fluence of 0.042-0.30MJ/m2 was applied with pulse numbers of 103 and 104.The surface morphology changes after laser irradiation were observed using laser scanning microscope. After laser irradiation, the grain ejection occurred above a certain energy fluence (~25 % of melting threshold).