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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. F. Debosscher, W. L. Dutre
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 69 | Number 3 | March 1979 | Pages 347-353
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A19951
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper deals with the exact stochastic analysis of the low-frequency neutron density fluctuations in an on-off controlled nuclear power reactor without delayed neutrons and perturbed by Gaussian white reactivity noise. The stochastic process, being Markovian, is completely characterized by its first-order probability density function (pdf) and the transition pdf The first-order pdf is the normalized solution to the time-independent Fokker-Planck equation (FPE). Using this pdf, a general expression for the moments is obtained. The conditions for stochastic stability in probability, in the mean, and in the mean-square are derived. The time-dependent FPE is solved using the Laplace transform technique, which results in four distinct expressions for the transition pdf, according to the relative magnitude of initial and final reactor power with respect to the regulator level. After Laplace inversion, a physical interpretation of the controller's effect on the stochastic process becomes possible. Finally, making use of the obtained pdf's, the spectral density of the reactor power fluctuations is calculated.