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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.
Christopher L. Leakeas, Edward W. Larsen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 137 | Number 3 | March 2001 | Pages 236-250
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2189
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Fokker-Planck equation is often used to approximate the description of particle transport processes with highly forward-peaked scattering. Pomraning has shown that if the physical scattering kernel is sufficiently dominated by small-angle scattering, then the Fokker-Planck equation is an asymptotic approximation to the linear Boltzmann equation. However, most physically-meaningful scattering kernels contain a sufficient amount of large-angle scattering that the asymptotic criterion is not met. Thus, in many physical problems, solutions of the Fokker-Planck equation are substantially in error. In this paper, Pomraning's asymptotic results are generalized and a new generalized Fokker-Planck (GFP) theory that robustly incorporates large-angle scattering is developed. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the resulting GFP equations are much more accurate than the standard Fokker-Planck equation.