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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.
D. C. Leslie, A. Jonsson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 23 | Number 3 | November 1965 | Pages 272-290
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE23-03-272
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method of calculating first-flight collision probabilities in cluster geometry is developed. The method is analytic and approximate and is comparable in speed to codes now available for annular geometry. The proposed scheme is based on a consideration of the properties of the nonescape probability from a nonuniform body in the limits of high and low macroscopic cross sections, together with an interpolation procedure that allows one to determine the probability itself with sufficient accuracy. When calculated for combinations of different rings of fuel pins in a cluster, the resulting set of nonescape probabilities enables one to proceed to a determination of the probability of going from one ring to another. The coolant and the fuel pins are treated separately. Results of the method are compared with exact calculations on two fuel-element types of current interest. In these cases the form factor, defined as the ratio of maximum to mean flux in the cluster, is in error by at most 2%. The hyperfine structure in each ring (i.e. the ratio of the mean flux in the coolant to the mean flux in the fuel) is calculated with comparable accuracy. A one-group calculation on a 37-rod fuel element takes approximately 5 sec on an IBM-7090, so that the method is certainly usable for multigroup applications.