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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.
Katsuo Suzuki, Junya Shimazaki, Koiti Watanabe
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 119 | Number 2 | February 1995 | Pages 128-138
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A24077
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The problem of estimating the time-varying net reactivity from flux measurements is solved for a point reactor kinetics model using a linear filtering technique in an H∞ setting. In order to use this technique, an appropriate dynamical model of the reactivity is constructed that can be embedded into the reactor model as one of its state variables. A filter, which minimizes the norm of the estimation error power spectrum, operates on neutron density measurements corrupted by noise and provides an estimate of the dynamic net reactivity. Computer simulations are performed to reveal the basic characteristics of the H∞ optimal filter. The results of the simulation indicate that the filter can be used to determine the time-varying reactivity from neutron density measurements that have been corrupted by noise.