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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.
S. A. Hasnain, D. Okrent
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 9 | Number 3 | March 1961 | Pages 314-322
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE61-A25882
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The performance of some blanket designs is studied using economically optimized cycling based on a simple economics model. For an 800-liter core fast reactor having a 45-cm radial blanket and an average core power of 1-Mw per liter, it appears that the outermost blanket elements make enough plutonium to pay for the cost of their fabrication and processing, unless the core power density falls well below the expected value. A cyclic motion of elements in the inward radial direction has little effect on the economics if optimum cycling is followed. Moving the blanket elements may have engineering advantages however, such as a uniform buildup and burnup, and less variation in power locally with time. A paste blanket with radial inward motion and axial mixing has a similar behavior. Inclusion of moderating material in a fast reactor blanket is not promising for a high-power density reactor using optimum cycling, but it may prove valuable if blanket fluxes get very low or the residence times of the blanket elements are limited.