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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.
T. W. Petrie, G. H. Miley
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 64 | Number 1 | September 1977 | Pages 151-162
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A27086
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Phase-space grouping techniques have been applied to two distinct problems in fusion product physics: (a) slowing down drift motion of highly energetic alpha particles in a symmetric toroidal field, and (b) first wall loading by 3.52-MeV alpha particles resulting from magnetic ripple. In the former, a weighted energy-loss approximation method permits the evolving orbits to be determined for any representative phase-space group. This enables rapid computation of several important suprathermal effects in a tokamak plasma. For example, code SYMALF, which embodies this idea, is applied to plasma heating and alpha-particle thermalization source problems. In the ripple field case, a probabilistic density function is employed to determine drift losses associated with ripple-trapped, 3.52-MeV alpha particles. When used to determine 3.52-MeV alpha-particle wall loadings, code RIPALF, which is based on this probability function, predicts the position of local “hot spots” along the first wall.