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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.
F. Sandras, C. Hermerel, A. Choux, P. Mérillot, G. Pin, L. Jeannot
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 4 | May 2009 | Pages 389-398
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A7416
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To characterize the shape, the quality, and the roughness of microshells, typically used technologies are scanning electron microscopy, scanning interferometric microscopy, or atomic force microscopy. One of the drawbacks of these techniques is that they are generally slow because of their scanning process. Digital holographic microscopy technology is an innovation that can offer ability adapted to these studies. It captures holograms instead of intensity images, as done by conventional microscopes. The holograms are then digitally interpreted (10 per second) to reconstruct a double image, one for the intensity and another one for the phase. Using a rotation axis, the bump counting for the complete microshell surface is possible with a very high speed. Using an image stitching software, mapping can be done in a few minutes. Wavelets such as "Mexican hat" are used to model the bumps. Each bump can then be characterized on the map by its position, diameter, and height.