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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.
A. Iwamoto et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 427-432
IFE Target Design | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8939
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fuel layering of a cryogenic target with a conical laser guide such as the FIREX target is complicated because of its non-spherical symmetry appearance. To simplify the layering, a foam layer is planned to utilize as a supporting material of fuel. Ideally, the foam shell has self-fuel-layering ability at a liquid state owing to the capillarity of the foam material. For stable fuel compression in laser experiments, the fuel must be solid with a lower saturated pressure. The transition to a solid state expects to cause random fuel crystallization and voids from the density difference between liquid and solid. A volumetric heat load might help to finish fuel layering even in the foam shell. Solid fuel redistribution will ignore the foam boundary. Temperature control in the target, therefore, is required during the formation of a uniform layer. For the rough estimation of the target temperature, the possibility of the ANSYS code was confirmed compared with the experiment using a dummy target. Then, steady state temperature profiles of the FIREX target were calculated using the ANSYS code. Temperature control to practically realize a uniform solid fuel layer in the FIREX target is discussed.