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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.
B. R. Merk, D. G. Cacuci
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 151 | Number 2 | October 2005 | Pages 184-193
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE05-A2539
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The derivation of a closed-form expression is presented for a three-timescale approximation of the point-kinetics equations with two effective groups of delayed neutrons. The results produced by this three-scale approximation are shown to be practically as accurate as the numerical results produced by the Kaganove-type algorithms used in production codes, yet at significantly less cost in computational time and resources. Potential uses of this approximation for increasing the efficiency of production codes for computing the space-time distribution of neutrons in reactors are also indicated.