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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.
Y. S. Rana, S. B. Degweker
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 162 | Number 2 | June 2009 | Pages 117-133
Technical Papers | doi.org/10.13182/NSE08-13
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In our earlier papers, we developed a theory of reactor noise for accelerator-driven systems (ADSs). It was shown that reactor noise in ADSs is different from that in critical or radioactive source-driven subcritical systems because of the periodically pulsed source and its non-Poisson character. Various noise descriptors, such as Rossi alpha, Feynman alpha (or variance to mean), power spectral density, and cross-power spectral density, were derived, for a periodically pulsed source, including correlation between different pulses and finite pulses of different shapes. Throughout the work we restricted ourselves to the case of prompt neutrons only. In the present paper, we extend the theory to the delayed neutron case. Feynman-alpha and Rossi-alpha formulas are derived by considering the source to be a periodically pulsed non-Poisson source, without correlations between different pulses. Each pulse is assumed to be a delta function. The calculations are carried out in the time domain that leads to closed-form expressions for these descriptors.