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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.
R. D. McKnight
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 75 | Number 1 | July 1980 | Pages 111-125
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE80-A20322
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A detailed validation study of the SDX fast reactor cell homogenization code, Benoist anisotropic diffusion coefficients, and an associated three-dimensional to one-dimensional unit cell modeling procedure has been in progress. These earlier results have investigated the standard zero power reactor (ZPR) plate-type unit cell The present study represents a complimentary validation effort for the ZPR pin calandria-type unit cell. The unit cell loading selected for this work consisted of a 5.08- × 5.08- × 30.48-cm voided calandria loaded with a 4 × 4 array of 0.957-cm (diam) × 15.24-cm mixed-oxide rods (15% PuO2/UO2). This unit cell was used in the pin zone measurements of the ZPR gas-cooled fast reactor program and also in the sodium-voided pin zone measurements of ZPR-6 Assembly 7. The validation effort consists of direct comparison with results of VIM (continuous energy Monte Carlo) calculations. The SDX/Gelbard methods have been shown to adequately predict both nonleakage and leakage effects for the voided pin calandria unit cell.