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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.
A. K. Agrawal, J. G. Guppy, I. K. Madni, V. Quan, W. L. Weaver III, J. W. Yang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 64 | Number 2 | October 1977 | Pages 480-491
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A27384
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The transient simulation of a liquid-metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR) plant requires (a) modeling of all processes that may be encountered and (b) the development of numerical methods to solve them. All models needed for the thermohydraulic simulation of the whole plant are formulated in this paper. We examine numerical techniques required to solve the governing equations, which are hyperbolic and parabolic partial-differential equations and ordinary differential equations. It appears that the implicit (or partially implicit) scheme is most suitable to meet both the stability and accuracy requirements. A new approach, labeled as the multistep scheme, to efficiently solve the entire system is then presented and illustrated through an example. For a simplified test problem, the multistep scheme has been found to be more efficient (by a factor of 2 to 3) than the commonly used single-step methods. This effort has resulted in the creation of a system transient simulation code, called SSC, for LMFBRs.