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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.
Yutong Wen, Ding She, Lei Shi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 11 | November 2023 | Pages 2920-2934
Regular Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2172312
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
There exists a neutron streaming effect in the high-temperature gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor (HTGR) pebble-bed core caused by the spatial heterogeneity of the neutron’s free path, which has a remarkable impact on neutron leakage. It is necessary to take into consideration the streaming effect in evaluating the homogenized diffusion coefficient of the pebble bed, prior to the whole-core diffusion calculation. In this paper, two methods are proposed for calculating the homogenized multigroup diffusion coefficient of the pebble bed based on migration area conservation theory and Benoist’s theory, respectively. Compared with existing methods, the newly proposed methods are adaptable to a general pebble bed consisting of multitype pebbles and nonvacuum atmosphere. Numerical results demonstrate the proposed methods’ effectiveness and consistency in evaluation of the pebble-bed homogenized diffusion coefficient.