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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.
Alan J. Markworth
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 49 | Number 4 | December 1972 | Pages 506-507
Technical Notes | doi.org/10.13182/NSE72-A22570
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A simple model for the gas-diffusion-controlled growth of stationary gas bubbles in an isothermal solid, under constant rate of gas generation, is used to evaluate the temperature dependence of fission-gas swelling in uranium monocarbide. Using experimental data for the temperature-dependent volume diffusivity of xenon in uranium carbide, it is found that the predicted temperature at which the onset of fission-gas swelling occurs, evaluated at a given fission density, correlates relatively well with swelling data and is of the order of one-half the absolute melting point. Variations of bubble concentration and gas-generation rate are found to affect this predicted swelling-onset temperature only to a relatively slight extent.