Tetsuo Tanabe – författare

This book focuses on tritium as a fuel for fusion reactors and a next-generation energy source. Following an introduction of tritium as a hydrogen radioisotope, important issues involved in establishing safe and economical tritium fuel cycles including breeding for a fusion reactor are summarized; these include the handling of large amounts of tritium: confinement, leakage, contamination, permeation, regulation and tritium accountancy, and impacts on surrounding areas. Targeting and encouraging the students and technicians who will design and operate fusion reactors in the near future, this book offers a valuable resource on tritium science and technology.

This book is a primer on the interplay between plasma and materials in a fusion reactor, so-called plasma–materials interactions (PMIs), highlighting materials and their influence on plasma through PMI. It aims to demonstrate that a plasma-facing surface (PFS) responds actively to fusion plasma and that the clarifying nature of PFS is indispensable to understanding the influence of PFS on plasma. It describes the modern insight into PMI, namely, relevant feedback to plasma performance from plasma-facing material (PFM) on changes in a material surface by plasma power load by radiation and particles, contrary to a conventional view that unilateral influence from plasma on PFM is dominant in PMI.

There are many books and reviews on PMI in the context of plasma physics, that is, how plasma or plasma confinement works in PMI. By contrast, this book features a materials aspect in PMI focusing on changes caused by heat and particle load from plasma: how PFMs are changed by plasma exposure and then, accordingly, how the changed PFM interacts with plasma.

This book aims to explain radiation from a somewhat different aspect than its traditional image as something that is scary, dangerous, hazardous, and so on, to produce the correct understanding that radiation is carrying energy, and to convince readers that radiation is not "scary" but controllable and useful. As for radiation itself, many introductions or textbooks have been published, as in radiochemistry, radiobiology, and radiology. In most of them, the biological effects of radiation exposure are the main subjects, which often enhance the feeling that radiation is dangerous, and the effects produced by lower-dose exposure that are difficult to see are hardly discussed.

The present volume mainly focuses on how radiation carries energy, how energy is absorbed in substances as absorbed doses (Gy) or dose equivalents (Sv), how damages or risks appear with the absorbed dose and why the effects of the exposure appear quite differently, depending on properties of the substancesthat were exposed.