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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.
T. M. Tran, J. Ligou
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 79 | Number 3 | November 1981 | Pages 269-277
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE81-A19404
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The time-dependent linear Fokker-Planck equation governing the transport of fast ions in a spherical host medium is solved in the suprathermal energy range, including both continuous slowing down and angular diffusion. Because of the parabolic nature of the angular dispersion term, an implicit time-centered scheme is proposed. On the other hand, a second-order diamond approximation in energy and space is chosen to avoid the spurious numerical diffusion driven by the usual first-order methods. The last variable, the pitch angle cosine, is discretized by centered finite differences. Good accuracy is demonstrated when comparing the results of the proposed method with the “exact” values given in the literature for some benchmark problems or by checking energy and particle balance equations. A numerical code (CIRCE) based on this scheme has been developed; it can be coupled to standard one-dimensional hydrodynamics codes after a few straightforward modifications.