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Chernobyl at 40 years: Looking back at Nuclear News
Sunday, April 26, at 1:23 a.m. local time will mark 40 years since the most severe nuclear accident in history: the meltdown of Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.
In the ensuing four decades, countless books, documentaries, articles, and conference sessions have examined Chernobyl’s history and impact from various angles. There is a similar abundance of outlooks in the archives of Nuclear News, where hundreds of scientists, advocates, critics, and politicians have shared their thoughts on Chernobyl over the years. Today, we will take a look at some highlights from the pages of NN to see how the story of Chernobyl evolved over the decades.
Sergey Pestchanyi, Francesco Maviglia
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 7 | October 2019 | Pages 647-653
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1643684
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simulation of divertor target damage during thermal quench of the disruption in the future DEMO tokamak has been performed using the TOKES code. This parametric study includes damage estimation for disruptions of the plasma energy E0 in the DEMO core in the range of 0.4 to 1.3 GJ and of time duration 1 to 2 ms. According to the simulations, the maximum melt depth on the divertor targets is ~80 μm, independent of the energy content in the core. The melted pool maximum area grows from ~20 m2 for 0.4-GJ disruption to ~120 m2 for 1.3-GJ disruption. Maximum erosion depth is 4 μm for 1.3-GJ disruption and decreases to less than 1 μm with decreasing E0. The total quantity of vaporized tungsten ranges from 2 ∙ 1021 to 3 ∙ 1024 atoms for disruptions of 0.4 to 1.3 GJ. An additional parametric study has revealed weak dependence of the results from the characteristic widths λq of the disruptive flux in the scrape-off layer.