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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.
J. Ernest Wilkins, Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 5 | Number 4 | April 1959 | Pages 207-214
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE59-A25585
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A simple analytic formula is derived for the values of the prompt neutron density, the delayed neutron emitter densities, and the period in a reactor at the instant it has becòme prompt critical under the assumption that it has been brought to a prompt critical state from an arbitrary subprompt critical initial state by introducing reactivity at the constant rate of a dollars per second. For a fixed value of a, these formulas are asymptotic with respect to small values of the dimensionless parameter al/β, in which l is the mean lifetime of a neutron in the reactor and β is the fraction of fission neutrons which are delayed. For fast reactors, the quantity l/β is generally small, so that our formulas should be useful in estimating the power rise at prompt critical unless the rate of introduction of reactivity is quite large.