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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.
William E. Kastenberg, Paul L. Chambré
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 31 | Number 1 | January 1968 | Pages 67-79
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A18009
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The spatial and temporal behavior of neutron distributions governed by the nonlinear diffusion equation approximation to neutron transport theory are considered in this paper. Stability criteria for the equilibrium states of various reactor feedback models are determined by the method of comparison functions. The comparison functions are used to construct simple solutions with error bounds to the equations considered. The two reactor models considered are the prompt feedback and the adiabatic model. The stability of the equilibrium state was found to be governed by the generalized buckling κ and its relationship to μ the lowest eigenvalue of the associated linear Helmholtz equation. Negative feedback is considered in both cases. Since the comparison functions bound the true solution from above and below, one can determine absolute errors of the approximations involved when constructing solutions. In a similar fashion, a bound on the maximum value of the excursion can also be obtained with little extra effort.