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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.
W. L. Dutré, A. F. Debosscher
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 62 | Number 3 | March 1977 | Pages 355-363
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A26977
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents an exact and complete statistical analysis of the neutron density fluctuations resulting from Gaussian white reactivity noise in a point reactor model with proportional power feedback, but without delayed neutrons. The analysis includes the multiplicative effect of neutron density and reactivity variations. An exact solution of the time-independent Fokker-Planck equation is found, resulting in a gamma density function for the stationary first-order probability density of the power fluctuations. The time-dependent Fokker-Planck equation is solved for the Laplace transformed function, which can be written in terms of confluent hypergeometric functions. The subsequent inversion yields the transition probability density function. The most common first- and second-order statistical characteristics, such as moments, autocovariance function, and power spectral density, are calculated and compared to the results of a linearized analysis.