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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.
Paul B. Abramson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 62 | Number 2 | February 1977 | Pages 195-214
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A26957
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Subroutine POOL was developed for the study of hypothetical core disruptive accidents in nuclear reactors and, as such, is set up for use as a subroutine in the FX-2 Dynamic Neutronics Code. This combination permits scoping studies of the total neutronic/hydrodynamic interactions and is capable of performing phenomenological investigations of hypothetical problems ranging from the high ramp disassembly calculations, performed in the past by the Lagrangian code VENUS, to the study of recriticality in boiling pools of fuel and steel. POOL specifically includes, in at least parametric fashion, the following phenomena: 1. intra- and inter-element heat transfer by diffusion, convection, and radiation for both fuel and steel inside the pool and at the boundaries 2. local vapor generation and concurrent local pressurization 3. hydrodynamic behavior using the inviscid Navier-Stokes equations in a Eulerian formulation. Sample results are shown for boil-up of an initially quiescent dense pool of fuel and steel. Subroutine POOL was modified by removing the free surface portion of the calculation and the associated expansion of the Eulerian Grid. The combined code, known as FX2-P00L, was used to perform prompt burst calculations for two comparison cases for a lOOO-MW(th) demolike reactor. Good agreement is shown between FX2-POOL and VENUS II for these two hypothetical situations, indicating that the hydrodynamic and thermodynamic assumptions made in POOL are accurate enough for prompt burst analysis and compare well with the VENUS models.