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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.
Kim Wei Chin, Rei Kimura, Hiroshi Sagara, Kosuke Tanabe
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 7 | July 2022 | Pages 852-872
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.2018927
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Past studies validated the feasibility of the photofission reaction ratio (PFRR) method using both Gaussian and bremsstrahlung photons to estimate the isotopic composition of nuclear fuel materials without relying on their self-generated neutron information. However, the current PFRR method cannot solve a multinuclide system with more than two nuclides because the instability of the inverse matrix increases with the addition of the number of nuclides. Thus, this research proposes a numerical method for solving the simultaneous equations of a three-nuclide system onto PFRR to estimate the isotopic composition of nuclides. The results show good reproducibility with all cases maintained within a 10% isotopic composition difference except cases 6 and 7 of the first two photon energy combination schemes with maximum composition differences of 15.6% and 13.9% for 10% actual composition, respectively. A 20% actual composition of case 5 for the second photon energy combination scheme has a deviation of 10.6%, which is slightly larger than the 10% composition difference too. Out of three photon energy combination schemes, 6 MeV – 6.5 MeV – 11 MeV has the highest coefficient of determination for all three nuclides and the smallest deviation of below 10% composition difference. Random sampling with normal distribution was performed on the loss to photofission particles from MCNP with 200 sets for each 10 cases on the 6 MeV – 7 MeV – 11 MeV photon energy combination to study the stochastic errors. The isotopic compositions were calculated with the same numerical method, and the difference between the estimated and actual compositions that resulted were fitted with R. The fitting results show good agreement within 91.5% confidence intervals.