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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.
H.Nakamura
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 118 | Number 4 | December 1994 | Pages 235-248
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE94-A21494
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A semiempirical formula for neutron detector responses, to be used to infer reactivities in subcriticality measurements, is presented. A formal theory for the multipoint approximation of the Boltzmann operators makes possible the description of a large variety of nuclear fuel systems by means of an equivalent two-point model that regards a whole system as the coupled system made up of an arbitrary number of nuclear fuels. Because the analytic formula includes the fitting parameter associated with the detector configuration and because the removal of spatial effects or higher mode contaminations in the detector responses is accomplished by devising the detector configurations, the conventional point approximation can be used to infer the reactivity of a far-subcritical system. For an example of an application to existing experiments, the current method is used to analyze subcriticality measurements by using the 252Cf source-driven neutron noise analysis method.