Consider a plane of thickness $$\Delta z$$. The plane emits $$q$$ neutrons per second per unit area at a single energy and is comprised of a pure absorber. What is the angular flux at the right edge of the plane, $$\Phi(\Delta z, \mu)$$? Use your solution to give the angular flux emerging from an infinitely thin plane source. Hint: Use an integrating factor of $$\exp{(\sigma z / \mu)}$$.
The derivation of this solution is after the jump
A fuel assembly for a nuclear reactor.
Good question and one I get all the time. The other links I’ve found on the internets do a good, but dry, job describing what career paths are available to nuclear engineers. I get this question a lot from prospective students, so I thought I would jot down the answer here.
Before we begin it is important to remember that with many, if not all, degrees, the discipline helps define the career but does not cast the graduate into an ineluctable career path. How many English majors do you know that write books for a living.
Also, it is important to keep in mind that the typical career is dependent on what degree level we are talking about. In most cases, when someone asks this question they want to know about a nuclear engineer with a bachelor’s degree, so that is where we will start after the jump.
Lots of data on this plot: for each student you can read his/her exam scores, homework grades, and quiz grades.
I had some success recently in demonstrating to my students that their performance on the exams of a course is at least correlated with their performance on homework and quizzes. The figure above is from my fall 2012 nuclear reactor theory course. As it is obvious, those who did better on exam 1 were likely to perform well on exam 2. Also, the big dots, high homework scores, are likely to be in the top right as well.
Those students who did not get the point of this figure after some explanation at least had some fun pointing out their dot on the figure.
The following will demonstrate how I made this figure using R and the ggplot2 (Grammar of Graphics 2) package. Hit the jump to see more.