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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.
M. V. Speight
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 37 | Number 2 | August 1969 | Pages 180-185
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A20676
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The influence of intragranular bubbles, acting as efficient trapping sites, on the migration of fission gas atoms in material under irradiation is assessed. It is considered that the bubbles are unstable due to the operation of an irradiation-induced resolution process tending to dissolve their enclosed gas. Treating an individual grain within the material as a sphere whose boundary behaves as a perfect sink, general expressions are derived for the intragranular concentrations of gas existing instantaneously within bubbles and in solution. It is shown that the relationships may be simplified for the range of irradiation times and conditions likely to be encountered in practice. Under these conditions, an expression is obtained for the quantity of gas released to the grain boundary, and this is compared with the analogous expression derived previously by Booth for the case where there are no intragranular traps. The fact that the resolution process through its effects on bubbles at the grain boundary will return some gas to the matrix and in so doing destroy the property of perfect-sink behavior is later considered. By an approximate method the appropriate modification to the formula describing the quantity of gas released to the boundary is deduced. This final expression, including the complete effects of intragranular trapping and irradiation-induced resolution on gas migration, may provide the basis on which to calculate the amount of gas which is eventually released external to the material from regions where intergranular bubbles grow so large that they interlink.