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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.
Robin Größle, Alexander Kraus, Sebastian Mirz, Sebastian Wozniewski
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 3 | April 2017 | Pages 369-374
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1291237
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fusion facilities like ITER and DEMO will circulate several kilograms tritium and deuterium per day in their fuel cycle. For the separation of the hydrogen isotopologues the Isotope Separation System (ISS), based on cryogenic distillation, was developed at Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK). One challenge is to find and develop an in situ and real time method to analyse the isotopologic composition of the column content. Calibration tests with IR absorption spectroscopy (FTIR) with chemically equilibrated samples have been performed at the Tritium absorption IR Spectroscopy Experiment (TApIR). From this previous work and from literature, it is known that the dependence between IR absorbance and the concentrations is non-linear. This makes it impossible to extrapolate the calibration from equilibrium to non-equilibrium samples. This work shows a full D2, H2, and HD calibration with samples in and off the high temperature. This enables us now to measure composition of inactive liquid hydrogen samples with an accuracy of better than 5%. In addition, one of the main challenges on the way to a calibration with tritiated mixtures is shown, the IR absorbance at molecular dimers, which tremendously increases the complexity of IR absorption spectra.