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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.
H. Schaal, W. Bernnat
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 97 | Number 2 | October 1987 | Pages 161-173
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE87-A27462
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For calculations of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors with low-enrichment fuel, it is important to know the plutonium cross sections accurately. Therefore, a calculational method was developed, by which the plutonium cross-section data of the ENDF/B-IV library can be examined. This method uses zero- and one-dimensional neutron transport calculations to collapse the basic data into one-group cross sections, which then can be compared with experimental values obtained from integral tests. For comparison the data from the critical experiment CESAR-II of the Centre d’Etudes Nucléaires, Cadarache, France, were utilized. In this experiment samples with different plutonium concentrations and different mixtures of the plutonium isotopes were oscillated inside the core at different temperatures between 20 and 360°C. The simulation of this experiment through the calculational model developed in the present study showed that the ENDF/B-IV data for plutonium are reasonable.