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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.
P. Köhler, J. Ligou
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 54 | Number 3 | July 1974 | Pages 357-360
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE74-A23426
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Calculations of neutron streaming in gas-cooled fast reactors (GCFR) designed with fuel pins have not been made properly up to now. The usual approach for computing the diffusion coefficients fails for two reasons: (a) the voided region is located at the cell boundary, and (b) the pitch is such that two-dimensional infinite gaps extend through the reactor. For an infinite lattice, the diffusion coefficient will diverge, which means that, in principle, the diffusion theory is no longer valid. This fact has been more or less forgotten because most theories assume cylindrical cells and therefore remove this difficulty artificially. Introducing the real size of the reactor at the beginning, a new theory of the streaming, which generalizes the usual approach is developed; it appears as a buckling dependent term in the diffusion coefficient which diverges slowly for an infinite lattice. Fortunately, this term is small for usual reactor sizes, and one may, therefore, continue to use diffusion theory for practical calculations. The numerical applications to GCFR lattices show that the streaming was underestimated in the past.