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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.
Han Gon Kim, Soon Heung Chang, Byung Ho Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 113 | Number 1 | January 1993 | Pages 70-76
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE93-A23994
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In pressurized water reactors, the fuel reloading problem has significant meaning in terms of both safety and economics. The local power peaking factor must be kept lower than a predetermined value during a cycle, and the effective multiplication factor must be maximized to extract the maximum energy. If these core parameters could be obtained in a very short time, the optimal fuel reloading patterns would be found more effectively and quickly. A very fast core parameter prediction system is developed using the backpropagation neural network. This system predicts the core parameters several hundred times as fast as the reference numerical code, within an error of a few percent. The effects of the variation of the training rate coefficients, the momentum, and the hidden layer units are also discussed.