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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 167-174
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A24082
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The coupled collision probability and interface-current equations in the flat-flux, isotropic approximation are implemented in a light water reactor (LWR) lattice code that is under development. By using traditional Gaussian elimination of the subregion fluxes of the cells, the interface-current equations are turned into a nodal form. In the transformed flux and current equations, expressed in terms of response matrix theory, the coefficients become multiple-flight probabilities, which obey analogous conservation and reciprocity relations as the first-flight probabilities. The convergence of the iterative solution for the interface currents is accelerated by successive overrelaxation (SOR) and global rebalancing techniques. The improvement of the convergence rate is investigated in a series of test calculations. The optimal strategy is found to be alternation between one SOR iteration and three to four free iterations while the rebalancing should be limited to two initial iterations in normal LWR cases.