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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.
Mikdam Saleh, R. A. Danofsky, R. A. Hendrickson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 80 | Number 1 | January 1982 | Pages 179-184
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE82-A21414
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A number of investigators have discussed the use of two-detector cross power spectral density (CPSD) measurements to obtain the velocity of an axially propagating perturbation of the moderator density in a boiling water reactor. The basis of the measurements is the view that the detector response can be separated into local and global components where the local component, which is dominant for high frequencies (f > 2 Hz), makes possible the observation of the moving perturbation associated with steam flow in the reactor. For low frequencies, the response consists of a combination of the local and global components, and correlation with the perturbation velocity is not straightforward. In this Note, the asymptotic low and high frequency behavior of the CPSD is examined using the complex detector adjoint function formulation. It is shown that at low frequencies, where the wavelength of the perturbation is much larger than the axial core dimension, the phase of the CPSD and therefore the perturbation velocity correlates with the centroid spacing of detector functions involving the product of the detector adjoint function and the static flux. For high frequencies, on the other hand, the phase correlates with the detector spacing. This behavior is considered to be an alternate manifestation of the local/global concept. Numerical calculations based on a two-group, one-dimensional model are used to illustrate these observations. It is also shown using the model that the oscillations in the phase in the intermediate frequency range disappear for frequencies that correspond to wavelengths that are intergral multiples of the core height.