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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.
G. E. Goring
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 29 | Number 2 | August 1967 | Pages 180-188
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE67-A18526
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Established techniques for measuring thermal reactor flux and power which utilize, respectively, arbitrary placement of foils and overall heat balance, have limited accuracy and are difficult to apply. The proposed method is based on 135Xe accumulation, as manifested by control-rod positions, plus a set of relative flux factors taken over the entire core instead of only at isolated positions. The technique involves only routine operating data, and required calculations are quite manageable by machine computation. After development of the theory, application is illustrated using a set of data from the Union Carbide Nuclear Company research reactor at Tuxedo, New York. Results are quite reliable when rod positions during the shutdown period are used, but operating period ratios introduce large inaccuracies by magnification of routine imprecision in operating data. It is concluded that the method offers an easily obtainable check on the usual heat-balance information for heterogeneous reactors, particularly if applied to shutdown data or to a xenon equilibrium run.