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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.
Kai Masuda, Tomoya Nakagawa, Taiju Kajiwara, Heishun Zen, Kiyoshi Yoshikawa, Kazunobu Nagasaki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 523-527
Experimental Facilities and Nonelectric Applications | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8956
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion device driven by a ring-shaped built-in ion source is proposed and designed aiming at a reduced operating gas pressure in order to explore a possibility of a drastic enhancement in the fusion reaction rate in the envisaged beam-beam collision regime. In the present scheme ions will be extracted from a ring-shaped magnetron discharge plasma toward an IEC cathode grid placed concentrically at the center. A prototype ion source showed an accessible pressure of 5 mPa, which is hundreds times as low as the conventional glow-discharge-driven IEC. Dependence of the ion source current and extraction efficiency on the central IEC cathode voltage was studied by prototype experiments and numerical calculations. An IEC device with a built-in ion source was then designed based on these results. The expected IEC grid current is ~0.4 mA at 5 mPa, where observation of the beam-beam fusion contribution is anticipated.