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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.
B. D. Ganapol, D. E. Kornreich, J. A. Dahl, D. W. Nigg, S. N. Jahshan, C. A. Wemple
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 118 | Number 1 | September 1994 | Pages 38-53
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE94-A19020
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The solution to the searchlight problem for monoenergetic neutrons in a semi-infinite medium with isotropic scattering illuminated at the free surface is obtained through the numerical evaluation of an analytical expression for the scalar flux at various positions within the medium. The sources considered are normally incident pencil beam and isotropic point sources as well as a longitudinal uniformly distributed source. The analytic solution is effected by a recently developed numerical inversion technique applied to the Fourier-Bessel transform. The transform inversion results from the solution method of Rybicki, where the two-dimensional problem is solved by casting it as a variant of a one-dimensional problem. The numerical inversion results in a highly accurate solution. Comparisons of the analytic solution with results from Monte Carlo (MCNP) and discrete ordinates transport codes (DORT, TWODANT, and SMARTEPANTS) show excellent agreement. These comparisons, which are free from any associated data or cross-section set dependencies, provide significant evidence of the proper operation of the transport codes tested.