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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.
Mark D. DeHart, Ronald E. Pevey, Theodore A. Parish
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 118 | Number 2 | October 1994 | Pages 79-90
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE94-A28537
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method for applying the discrete ordinates method to solve the Boltzmann transport equation on arbitrary two-dimensional meshes has been developed. The finite difference approach normally used to approximate spatial derivatives in extrapolating angular fluxes across a cell is replaced by direct solution of the characteristic form of the transport equation for each discrete direction. Thus, computational cells are not restricted to the geometrical shape of a mesh element characteristic of a given coordinate system. However, in terms of the treatment of energy and angular dependencies, this method resembles traditional discrete ordinates techniques. By using the method developed here, a general two-dimensional space can be approximated by an irregular mesh comprised of arbitrary polygons. Results for a number of test problems have been compared with solutions obtained from traditional methods, with good agreement. Comparisons include benchmarks against analytical results for problems with simple geometry, as well as numerical results obtained from traditional discrete ordinates methods by applying the ANISN and TWOTRAN-II computer programs.