Category: Nuclear
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Nuclear Power – Converting Mass Into Energy?
One of the things that most people know about nuclear power is that it about turning mass into energy – E= mc2. Although this is […]
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Controlling Nuclear Fission
Every induced fission event produces two or more neutrons. These neutrons can go on to induce more fission, or they can be absorbed without producing […]
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Production and Fission of Transuranic Elements In A Nuclear Reactor
If you are wondering where I am going with this it is because it is relevant to nuclear weapons proliferation, thorium fuel cycles and the […]
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More About Neutrons
This is another background post and I am going to explain a bit more about the interaction of neutrons with matter. Since neutrons do not […]
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Cs-137 in Spent Fuel as it leaves the reactor
I am now going to get a rough idea of how much caesium 137 there is in spent nuclear fuel. One reason for choosing Cs-137 […]
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Production and Decay of Fission Products
We are going to assume that the fissile product has one mode of decay and does not do anything naughty, such as undergo neutron capture. […]
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Radioactivity of U-238
This is just an example of how to calculate the radioactivity of an isotope from its halflife. Uranium 238 has a halflife of 4.468×109 years […]
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A Rough Model of a Nuclear Reactor
This model is very rough however it gives some idea about power and energy output from a nuclear reactor which I will use in later […]
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Implications of High Burnup Fuel – Basic Notes
An important issue around nuclear new build is the amount and what happens to the spent fuel. The proposed EPR reactors at Sizewell and Hinkley […]
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Spent Fuel – Basic Notes
These are just a few basic notes about spent fuel waste from nuclear power stations. It assumes a basic understanding of the nuclear fission process […]
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Uranium Enrichment Formula
This is another one of those background information posts deriving the mass balances for uranium enrichment. Let us consider the following enrichment scenario: We have […]
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Secular and Transient Equilibrium Formula
I will give the full derivation since although it is quite long and looks complicated it uses nothing more than A-level mathematics. Despite this the […]
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Secular Equilibrium
The reason for this post is to help people understand ‘secular equilibrium’. The reason for people interest is mainly due to this report which is […]
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Thorium and Proliferation
I will probably write about the Thorium cycle a bit more at some later point. There seems to be a growing number of people who […]
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Nuclear Fusion
Let us look at the graph for the energy of various nuclei. Remember tht this graph is upside down and so Iron (Fe) has the […]
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About Uranium
It would be useful at this point to talk a bit more about Uranium and its isotopes. Uranium naturally occurs as two isotopes details of […]
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The Rate of Decay
The rate at which these unstable isotopes undergo decay varies greatly between the different isotopes. The process is random for each atom. However there is […]
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Gamma Radiation
When an atom undergoes alpha or beta decay it can leave the nucleus in a high energy state. The atom goes to a lower energy […]
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Decay Chains
When an atom undergoes radioactive decay the isotope produced is not necessarily stable itself. If it is not then that can undergo radioactive decay. This […]
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Moderation
We have discussed fission and neutron capture. Now we are going to talk about how we can increase the likelihood that fission or neutron capture […]
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