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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.
S. Yamashita
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 54 | Number 4 | August 1974 | Pages 432-444
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE74-A23437
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Accurate kinetics equations, which can be applied to a square and to a two-step gas-separation cascade composed of stages with a large separation factor, are derived from the exact conservation of matter in the unsteady state. The derivation is based on the assumptions that flow rates and holdups are independent of time and that the second derivative of the assay with respect to time can be neglected. If two or three additional assumptions, including the important one that the separation factor is nearly equal to unity, are added to those above, the author’s equations reduce to Cohen’s kinetics equations. If a square cascade with eight stages composed of separators having a separation factor of 1.1 is supposed to be operated in total reflux, the results of the calculations disclose that the assays and the 98% equilibrium times obtained from the conventional equations are overestimated by ∼12 and ∼10%, respectively, compared with those obtained from the author’s equations. The author’s kinetics equations promise to be useful for analyzing the kinetics of a square cascade with a large separation factor such as a centrifuge.