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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.
K. D. Lathrop, N. S. Demuth
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 32 | Number 1 | April 1968 | Pages 120-130
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A18831
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new system of biorthogonal polynomials is developed for the angular expansion of the directional flux in the linear Boltzmann transport equation. It is shown in systems infinite in one space dimension that the angular integral in the Boltzmann equation can be reduced to a weighted integral over the unit circle. The corresponding system of orthogonal functions is found to be a system of two sets of polynomials in two variables. Recursion relations and an addition theorem are derived for these polynomials. The angular dependence of the particle flux is expanded in each set of these polynomials. Systems of partial differential equations are derived for the expansion coefficients, that is, for angular moments of the particle flux. One of these systems is shown to be a specific linear combination of the equations obtained when the directional flux is expanded in spherical harmonics functions specialized for the geometry considered. It is shown that this same system, in (x, y) geometry, reduces simply to the spherical harmonics equations in one-dimensional plane geometry.