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Nuclear Installations Safety
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Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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How to talk about nuclear
In your career as a professional in the nuclear community, chances are you will, at some point, be asked (or volunteer) to talk to at least one layperson about the technology you know and love. You might even be asked to present to a whole group of nonnuclear folks, perhaps as a pitch to some company tangential to your company’s business. So, without further ado, let me give you some pointers on the best way to approach this important and surprisingly complicated task.
Yoshikuni Shinohara, Ritsuo Oguma
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 52 | Number 1 | September 1973 | Pages 76-83
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE73-A23290
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A simple method of nonlinear filtering is applied to the problem of dynamic reactivity estimation in which the law of reactivity change is assumed to be unknown. The filter is designed based on a system model containing the usual point reactor kinetics equations driven by fictitious white noises and a reactivity state equation. The latter is formulated such that the rate of the reactivity change is a random process, taking account of the unknown reactivity change. The nonlinear filter applied here is a simple modification of the Kalman filter added with a nonlinear feedback loop. The key parameter that determines the filter response is the parameter of the fictitious noise in the reactivity equation which is closely related to the filter gain. The results of the computer simulation and the experiment show that the nonlinear filter can be used to estimate the dynamic reactivity, even under an extremely noisy measurement condition.