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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.
Takashi Kiguchi, Shigehiro An, Akira Oyama
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 43 | Number 3 | March 1971 | Pages 328-340
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE71-A19979
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The energy modal synthesis method is applied to the computation of the neutron-multiplication factor, the sodium-void coefficient, and the spatial-power distribution of an idealized fast reactor configuration. The method is formulated by means of the variational principle and the error estimator is introduced by the expansion technique of the trial functions in the eigenfunction series. In the space-independent case, the sodium-void coefficient and its error are obtained very accurately by the linear combination of two modes, and the optimal two modes are chosen by the physical consideration. In the one-dimensional case, the continuous-type and the discontinuous-type energy modal synthesis method are formulated. In both cases the infinite-medium spectra and some supplementary modes are used as the trial energy modes. The results of a few-mode synthesis give a good estimate of the reactor parameters, and the error can be evaluated successfully by the error estimator.