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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.
O. Ågren, V. E. Moiseenko, K. Noack, A. Hagnestål
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 4 | May 2010 | Pages 326-334
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST57-326
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The straight field line mirror (SFLM) field with magnetic expanders beyond the confinement region is proposed as a compact device for transmutation of nuclear waste and power production. A design with reactor safety and a large fission-to-fusion energy multiplication is analyzed. Power production is predicted with a fusion Q = 0.15 and an electron temperature of [approximately]500 eV. A fusion power of 10 MW may be amplified to 1.5 GW of fission power in a compact hybrid mirror machine. In the SFLM proposal, quadrupolar coils provide stabilization of the interchange mode, radio-frequency heating is aimed to produce a hot sloshing ion plasma, and magnetic coils are computed with an emphasis on minimizing holes in the fission blanket through which fusion neutrons could escape. Neutron calculations for the fission mantle show that nearly all fusion neutrons penetrate into the fission mantle. A scenario to increase the electron temperature with a strong ambipolar potential suggests that an electron temperature exceeding 1 keV could be reached with a modest density depletion by two orders in the expander. Such a density depletion is consistent with stabilization of the drift cyclotron loss cone mode.