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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.
M. Mazumdar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 47 | Number 2 | February 1972 | Pages 187-194
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE72-A22395
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the thermal hydraulic design of nuclear reactor cores, it is of interest to know the probability for 0, 1, 2, . . . , D hot channels and/or cladding and fuel hot spots [i.e., channels (spots) in the core at which temperature limits are exceeded]. A previous paper considered this problem and provided a technique, referred to as the method of correlated temperatures, for obtaining the distribution of the number of hot channels. This method is partly analytical and partly Monte Carlo. In the present paper a special case, that of zero hot channels, is considered and it is shown that by application of the theory of extremes numerical results can still be obtained without the use of Monte Carlo computations proposed earlier. A hot channel factor analysis is carried out using the proposed method on a simplified hypothetical LMFBR-type core and the results are compared with those obtained (a) from the method of correlated temperatures and (b) Amendola’s method. The method based on extreme value theory compares very favorably with the more general method of correlated temperatures.