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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.
K. L. Thomsen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 119 | Number 3 | March 1995 | Pages 153-166
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A24081
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Efficient methods for the evaluation of collision, escape, and transmission probabilities in the flat-flux, isotropic approximation have been developed for various heterogeneous pin cells. The cells may be either cylindricalized or square with the moderator treated as either a single region or subdivided into the four segments between the diagonals. The conventional “Flurig” scheme by Carlvik is applied to the circular regions and to the four partial surfaces in the cylindricalized cases. For the noncircular regions and surfaces of the square-cell types, the numerical integration in both the radial and the angular direction is based on Gaussian quadrature. The mesh layout is designed with due regard to the directions to corners and vertices to avoid overlap between neighboring regions or surfaces. For rays outside the circular regions, the integration in the radial direction is performed analytically. Furthermore, the symmetry properties as well as the reciprocity and conservation relations are utilized to the maximum possible extent. Thus, high efficiency is achieved, requiring only a few mesh points in both directions as demonstrated by application to various test cases from the literature.