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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. M. Sicilian
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 56 | Number 3 | March 1975 | Pages 291-300
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE75-2
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Space-dependent reactor kinetics problems can be solved by response techniques in which subassemblies of the core (called cells) are treated as “black box” transducers of neutron currents. In this paper we present a continuous integral theory of space-time neutronics, reduce this theory to an approximate response-matrix method, and solve some monoenergetic one-dimensional problems.The principal advantage over more usual reactor kinetics methods is the achievement of accuracy with a coarse spatial grid. Previously, criticality calculations using response-matrix methods had established this principle. The present work extends the result to time-dependent situations.The author believes that development of the response-matrix technique can significantly reduce the computational effort required for solution, without loss of accuracy, of a broad class of space-time reactor problems.