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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.
Heiner Meldner
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 69 | Number 3 | March 1979 | Pages 438-441
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A19963
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) pellet center burnup of fission reactor waste, namely, 14-MeV neutron fission of the very long-lived actinides that pose storage problems, is calculated for realistic target designs. A major advantage of pellet center burnup is safety: Only milligram quantities of highly toxic and active material need to be present in the fusion chamber, whereas blanket burnup reqUires the continued presence of tons of actinides in a small volume. One ICP plant can transmute the actinide waste of up to ten power equivalent fission reactors, i.e., large-scale development appears to provide a foreseeable-future technology that greatly reduces the necessity of high integrity waste storage (burial) time: from 107 to just over 102 yr.