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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.
Charles E. Cohn, Robert J. Johnson and Robert N. Macdonald
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 26 | Number 2 | October 1966 | Pages 198-206
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A28162
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method has been developed by which statics techniques can be used to calculate source transfer functions in the multigroup, multidimensional approximation. With the flux resolved into steady and fluctuating components, the time-dependent neutron balance equations are satisfied by the fluctuating part alone. Assuming that the external source and the flux response are sinusoidal, the original time-dependent equations transform into a set of complex equations dependent on space and frequency but independent of time. Separating the equations into real and imaginary parts yields coupled, inhomogeneous differential equations (two for each group). These can be solved by well-known statics techniques for the real and imaginary components φR and φI of the complex amplitudes of the fluxes, in turn yielding the gain and phase shift for each frequency of interest. This method was applied to the NORA reactor for which the space-dependent transfer function had been determined experimentally. The two-group telegrapher's equations were programmed for one-dimensional cylindrical geometry and the difference equations solved by direct matrix inversion and also by interative techniques. Results of the calculations closely reproduce the reported experimental results for gain and phase shift.