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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.
Dong H. Nguyen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 55 | Number 3 | November 1974 | Pages 307-319
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE74-A23457
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Transient solutions of a nonlinear nuclear reactor with various temperature-dependent feedbacks are obtained by the modified Newton-Raphson-Kantorovich’s iterative technique. The difference between the first and higher iterates is shown explicitly to be negligible at all times, so that the first iterate represents well the entire solution. It is also shown that the spatial distribution of the neutron flux during transience is dominated by the fundamental mode and that the negligible difference between the second and the first iterates is composed of higher harmonics.—, The maximum flux, the time at which it occurs, and the rate of flux increase are all readily obtained from the solutions. For an increase in reactor buckling and for a positive initial flux disturbance, the neutron flux in a reactor with Newtonian or prompt feedback reaches a finite asymptotic value, whereas that of an adiabatic reactor first rises, then drops off. However, for the same initial conditions, the maximum flux attained in an adiabatic reactor is several fold higher than that of a reactor with Newtonian or prompt feedback.