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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.
Ronald J. Ellis, Juergen Rapp
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 4 | November 2015 | Pages 750-757
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-909
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Plasma-material interaction is a major concern in fusion reactor design and analysis. The Material Plasma Exposure eXperiment (MPEX) will explore plasma-material interaction under fusion reactor plasma conditions. Samples with accumulated displacement damage (characterized by displacements per atom) produced by fast neutron irradiations in the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory will be studied in the MPEX facility. This paper presents assessments of the calculated induced radioactivity and resulting radiation dose rates of a variety of potential fusion reactor plasma-facing materials, e.g., tungsten. The scientific code packages Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) and Standardized Computer Analyses for Licensing Evaluation (SCALE) were used to simulate irradiation of the samples in HFIR. This included the generation and depletion of nuclides in the material and the subsequent composition, activity levels, gamma radiation fields, and resultant dose rates as a function of cooling time. A challenge of the MPEX project is to minimize the radioactive inventory in the preparation of the samples and the sample dose rates for inclusion in the MPEX facility.