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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.
Yueqiang Liu, S. A. Sabbagh, I. T. Chapman, S. Gerasimov, Y. Gribov, T. C. Hender, V. Igochine, M. Maraschek, G. Matsunaga, M. Okabayashi, E. J. Strait
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 3 | November 2016 | Pages 387-405
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-207
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The high-frequency noise measured by magnetic sensors, at levels above the typical frequency of resistive wall modes, is analyzed across a range of present tokamak devices including DIII-D, JET, MAST, ASDEX Upgrade, JT-60U, and NSTX. A high-pass filter enables identification of the noise component with Gaussian-like statistics that shares certain common characteristics in all devices considered. A conservative prediction is made for ITER plasma operation of the high-frequency noise component of the sensor signals, to be used for resistive wall mode feedback stabilization, based on the multimachine database. The predicted root-mean-square n = 1 (n is the toroidal mode number) noise level is 104 to 105 G/s for the voltage signal, and 0.1 to 1 G for the perturbed magnetic field signal. The lower cutoff frequency of the Gaussian pickup noise scales linearly with the sampling frequency, with a scaling coefficient of about 0.1. These basic noise characteristics should be useful for the modeling-based design of the feedback control system for the resistive wall mode in ITER.