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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. J. Buslik
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 32 | Number 2 | May 1968 | Pages 233-240
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A19735
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Few-group diffusion equations are derived from variational principles. It is shown that by proper choice of trial function it is possible to derive a few-group theory in which interface boundary conditions of continuity of few-group fluxes and currents are obtained, even when the few-group constants are obtained by flux-adjoint weighting. The analysis is facilitated by the use of functionals that incorporate the interface condition of flux continuity by means of Lagrange multipliers. Two functionals are used to give two variants of the theory. Both functionals have as Euler equations the P-1 approximation to the time-independent, eigenvalue form of the energy-dependent transport equation. In addition, the current and flux interface boundary conditions are part of the complement of Euler conditions of the functionals. The functionals admit trial functions discontinuous in space and energy. The two functionals differ in that one has both flux and current arguments, whereas the other has only flux arguments, and yields the P-1 equations in second-order diffusion form.