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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.
Takanobu Kamei, Tadashi Yoshida, Toshikazu Takeda, Takuya Umano
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 91 | Number 1 | September 1985 | Pages 11-33
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE85-A17126
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The prediction accuracy of the burnup characteristics of large liquid-metal fast breeder reactors (LMFBRs) is very hard to evaluate because of the unavailability of the direct experimental information. A quantitative evaluation was performed on the accuracy of the burnup property by use of the sensitivity coefficients in a large LMFBR and the covariance matrix of nuclear data. Also evaluated was the decrease in prediction error when the cross-section set was adjusted by the use of experimental data, such as criticality, reaction rate ratios, and others. It was concluded that accuracy with the direct use of current nuclear data is ±30% for burnup reactivity loss and ±5% for breeding ratio. On the other hand, the accuracy would be improved to ±18% and ±2.5% by utilizing the experimental data obtained on the zero-power plutonium reactor assembly.