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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.
W. S. Yang, P. J. Finck, H. Khalil
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 111 | Number 1 | May 1992 | Pages 21-33
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE92-A23920
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A reconstruction method is developed for recovering pin burnup characteristics from fuel cycle calculations performed in hexagonal-z geometry using the nodal diffusion option of the DIF3D/REBUS-3 code system. Intranodal distributions of group fluxes, nuclide densities, power density, burnup, and fluence are efficiently computed using polynomial shapes constrained to satisfy nodal information. The accuracy of the method is tested by performing several fast reactor numerical benchmark calculations and by comparing predicted local burnups with values measured for experimental assemblies in the Experimental Breeder Reactor II. The results indicate that the reconstruction methods are quite accurate yielding maximum errors in power and nuclide densities that are <2% for driver assemblies and typically <5% for blanket assemblies.