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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.
Jean Boscary, Masanori Araki, Satoshi Suzuki, Koichiro Ezato, Masato Akiba
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 35 | Number 3 | May 1999 | Pages 289-296
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A82
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The purpose of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) divertor, which is located at the bottom of the vacuum vessel, is to exhaust impurities and their power from the plasma. Divertor plates function to withstand and to remove a steady-state surface heat flux of 5 MW/m2 and a transient peak heat flux up to 20 MW/m2 for 10 s on the side that faces the plasma. These demanding heat loads require active cooling by a pressurized subcooled flow of water as well as the development of a high-performance cooling channel to avoid burnout. Previous experiments showed that a screw tube, which is a tube whose inner surface is machined like a nut, is an efficient means of removing high heat fluxes. New experiments have been carried out with a B 0205 M10 type of screw copper tube. The average inner diameter, i.e., at the midheight of the fin, is 10 mm, and the outer diameter is 14 mm. Different pitches have been investigated: 1.5, 1.25, 1, and 0.75 mm. Incident critical heat fluxes (ICHFs) between 25 and 47 MW/m2 have been reached for local pressures ranging from 0.9 to 2.2 MPa, inlet temperatures from 17 to 33°C, and axial velocities from 3.6 to 14 m/s. ICHF increases as axial velocity increases and depends slightly on local pressure. Experimental results confirm the potentialities of the screw tube as a reliable geometry for fusion cooling tubes.