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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.
Kosuke Aizawa, Koei Sasaki, Yoshitaka Chikazawa, Masaru Fukuie, Noboru Jinbo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 1 | October 2018 | Pages 74-82
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1469346
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Development of an inspection technique in opaque liquid-metal coolant is one of the important issues to ensure the safety of the liquid-metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR). Performance tests of an under sodium viewer (USV), which was developed to detect an obstacle in the reactor vessel (RV) of the LMFBR Monju, have been carried out. Ultrasonic sensors and reflectors are located across the core inside Monju’s RV. The USV can detect an obstacle existing between the core top and the upper core structure bottom by identifying differences of echo signals. This paper describes the USV performance tests. In the tests, the reference echo signals under various conditions were accumulated, and the signal-to-noise ratio successfully exceeded the target value. Measured signals clearly differed with and without an obstacle. These experimental results show the performance of the USV for detecting an obstacle in a specified place.