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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.
Xuan Ha Nguyen, Yonghee Kim
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 189 | Number 3 | March 2018 | Pages 224-242
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1394086
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Detailed pin-by-pin core calculations are under development to replace the conventional assembly-based nodal methods. This research investigates a novel intrapin reconstruction procedure coupled with these pinwise calculations to obtain a detailed power profile within a fuel rod. The reconstruction process is based on the well-established form function (FF) method. In this paper, the fuel rod is geometrically divided into 40 equi-volume subsections where the intrapin power is reconstructed with corresponding heterogeneous FF. The intrapin homogeneous flux distributions are approximated by using the analytical solution of the two-group neutron diffusion equation with pinwise boundary constraints. Four types of constraints are considered to determine the flux shapes: surface-average net current, surface-average, corner-point, and volume-average cell fluxes. Therefore, six different combinations of the boundary constraints are separately evaluated for the intrapin power profile. All necessary information, including burnup-dependent FFs, homogenized group constants, reference power distribution, and pinwise boundary constraints, are predetermined from a high-fidelity Monte Carlo calculation. The numerical results demonstrate that the intrapin power can be retrieved for enriched and Gd-loaded fuel pins with reasonable accuracy, even at rodded conditions and in highly burned conditions of 10 and 30 GWd/tonne U. In addition, a sensitivity analysis is also performed to assess the feasibility of the proposed method when it is coupled with a pinwise calculation.