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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.
Gregory D. Spriggs
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 114 | Number 4 | August 1993 | Pages 342-351
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE92-78
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An-in-pile experimental technique to measure the decay constants and the relative abundances of the delayed neutron groups applicable for a given reactor system is presented. The method is based on a least-squares-fitting technique that simultaneously fits a series of transients produced by small reactivity perturbations to a reactor operating initially at delayed critical. The function that is least-squares fit is the analytic solution (written in terms of an arbitrary number of delayed neutron groups) as obtained by the point reactor model for the reactor response following a step change in reactivity. The application of the method does not require any knowledge of the size of the reactivity perturbations, and the method is independent of the detector efficiency. The results are based solely on the measurable quantities of relative power, time, and one measurable root of the Inhour equation.