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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.
G. E. Hansen and H. A. Sandmeier
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 22 | Number 3 | July 1965 | Pages 315-320
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE65-A20935
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Adjoint transport theory is most widely used in perturbation theory. A most common problem here is the determination of the reactivity change in a self-multiplying system due to the insertion of an absorber in a small region. There is, however, a class of problems of the source-detector type where adjoint transport theory proves to be a very effective and fast way of obtaining the desired results. In many practical source problems we want to evaluate the reaction rate, say fissions or absorptions, in a material surrounded by a moderator due to a neutron flux incident on the assembly. Here the main advantage of using the adjoint method as opposed to the conventional real-flux shell-source calculations is a significant reduction in computer time. The reactions induced by each group of source neutrons is obtained from one run of an adjoint problem. To obtain the same information from real-flux calculations we need an individual run for every energy group g. Computer time savings ranging by a factor of 5 to 30 are representative. The theory previously reported by one of us (H.A.S.) in the classified literature is derived and subsequently applied to the following problems. a. the fissions induced in a spherical plutonium-detector foil separated by a moderating layer from an incident collimated neutron beam; b. a neutron-dose-rate detector device consisting of a lithium iodide crystal to register absorptions surrounded by a sphere of polyethylene; c. the theoretical evaluation of the neutronic coupling coefficient between two reactors, as one might visualize in a clustered-Rover nuclear-reactor rocket-engine system.