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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.
P. A. Pizzica, P. B. Abramson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 64 | Number 2 | October 1977 | Pages 465-479
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A27383
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The computer code EPIC models fuel and coolant motion that results from internal fuel pin pressure (from fission gas or fuel vapor) and/or from the generation of sodium vapor pressures in the coolant channel subsequent to pin failure in a liquid-metal fast breeder reactor. The modeling includes the ejection of molten fuel from the pin into a coolant channel with any amount of voiding through a clad rip which may be of any length or which may expand with time. One-dimensional Eulerian hydrodynamics is used to model both the motion of fuel and fission gas inside a molten fuel cavity and the mixture of two-phase sodium and fission gas in the channel. Motion of molten fuel particles in the coolant channel is tracked with a particle-in-cell technique.