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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.
K. Kotoh, M. Tanaka, T. Sakamoto, S. Takashima, T. Asakura, T. Uda, T. Sugiyama
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 184-189
Tritium, Safety, and Environment | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8899
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Authors have been studying the adsorption or/and desorption behavior of H2 or/and D2 with synthetic zeolite packed-beds under the cryogenic condition of liquid nitrogen temperature, aiming at developing a pressure swing adsorption (PSA) process of hydrogen isotope separation useful for tritium processing in fusion fuel cycle and environmental tritium safety confinement, or convenient for deuterium production. We examined the mass transfer in the adsorption system of D2 diluted in H2 with zeolite packed-beds, experimentally and analytically. The results have been presented, where it is shown that the enrichment factor of D2 in packed-beds matches with estimated from the isothermal adsorption characteristics and that the mass transfer is controlled in the macro-pore media of adsorbents. In this work, the behavior of tracer HD added in a H2-D2 mixture with zeolite 5A and 13X packed-beds was experimentally investigated, and was analyzed by the curve-fitting as well as for the behavior of D2. In this report, the experimental results demonstrate that the breakthrough curves of HD exhibit analogous to those of D2 but reduced in the breakthrough time in comparison to the latter. The analytical results verify that the HD/H2 separation factor in packed-beds agrees with predicted from the isothermal adsorption characteristics, and show that the isotope effect on the mass transfer depends on the molecular mass effect.