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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.
Marc Rosselet, Rakesh Chawla, Tony Williams
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 135 | Number 1 | May 2000 | Pages 33-47
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-33
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two of the methods that can be used for the measurement of the subcriticality of a multiplying system are the inverse kinetic (IK) and the pulsed neutron source (PNS) techniques. These methods depend considerably on correction factors and/or kinetic parameters, which usually need to be calculated using the same neutronic codes as those being validated via the experiments. The use of epithermal detectors to reduce the dependence of area-ratio PNS measurements on calculated correction factors was reported previously. In the current work, for the first time, epithermal detectors have been used for IK measurements. As in the case of the PNS experiments, these were carried out in core/reflector configurations with large spatial effects, systematic comparisons with thermal measurements clearly bringing out the considerably lower sensitivity of the epithermal IK results to calculational corrections. A new two-group point-kinetic model has currently been developed as an extension of the usual theoretical basis (employing a single energy group) for analyzing kinetic experiments. This has been essential for justifying the analysis methodology employed for the epithermal IK measurements.