Colin Tucker > Quotes

“Neutrons are lost in other ways. Some of them are captured by hydrogen-1 nuclei in the water to make hydrogen-2 (also known as heavy hydrogen or deuterium).”
― Colin Tucker, How to Drive a Nuclear Reactor

“U-235 is not a happy atom… (OK, I mean nucleus, but that doesn’t sound as good, does it?) If you can find a way to give a U-235 nucleus just a bit more energy, it’ll probably give up and split into two smaller nuclei. In physics, there are ways of doing this. For a nucleus, a simple way is to drop in another neutron—”
― Colin Tucker, How to Drive a Nuclear Reactor

“PWR is inherently stable with a strongly negative void coefficient. Any significant boiling in your PWR rapidly reduces reactor power, rather than increasing it.”
― Colin Tucker, How to Drive a Nuclear Reactor

“The measure of how much the reactivity changes in a PWR core with boiling is known as the ‘Void Coefficient’. Its units are a little different from MTC and FTC, and you’ll often see it written down as ‘milliNiles per %’ where the ‘%’ measures how much of the water has turned to steam (the ‘voidage’).”
― Colin Tucker, How to Drive a Nuclear Reactor