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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.
Zhaoyu Liang, Ding She, Yutong Wen, Lei Shi, Zuoyi Zhang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 12 | December 2024 | Pages 2291-2303
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2311595
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Dispersion fuel exhibits excellent safety performance and effectively reduces the risk of radioactive leakage, making it widely applied in high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs) and other advanced nuclear reactors. The presence of stochastic media in dispersion fuel leads to the challenging double-heterogeneity problem in neutron transport calculations. Hébert proposed a collision probability analysis model for treating stochastic media, which has been implemented in the DRAGON5 code. As one important basis of derivation, it is assumed in the Hébert model that the neutron transmission probability is identical to the neutron escaping probability in matrix material. In this paper, it is figured out that the assumption is not rigorous for realistic stochastic media. Then, an improved approach based on the Hébert model is proposed to take into account the realistic chord length distribution as well as to ensure the conservation and reciprocity of collision probabilities. The proposed methodology has been implemented in the HTGR lattice physics code XPZ. By numerical analysis against Monte Carlo reference solutions, it is demonstrated that the improved Hébert model with chord length correction gives good accuracy for addressing realistic double-heterogeneity problems.