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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.
A. I. Shestakov, D. S. Kershaw, G. B. Zimmerman
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 105 | Number 1 | May 1990 | Pages 88-104
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE90-A19215
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several test problems are presented for evaluating the radiation diffusion equations. For spatial transport schemes, one-dimensional problems with known analytic solutions are tested on two-dimensional domains with nonorthogonal meshes. It is shown that a scheme based on the finite element method is insensitive to grid distortions when the diffusion term is dominant. Other test problems deal with Compton scattering, specifically the one-dimensional Fokker-Planck equation coupled to an equation describing the change in electron temperature. The test problems model the evolution of a Planckian radiation field as it equilibrates with the electrons. In all cases, the numerical results are compared with the analytic ones.