Controlled release of nuclear energy, and everything that must not go wrong.
10 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Reactor Concepts Manual
United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission · 2003
Explains how a reactor actually controls a chain reaction — moderation, control rods, feedback — at the level the regulator expects its own…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Report of the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island
President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island · 1979
Finds the equipment failure survivable and the response not: operators trained to follow procedures could not diagnose a plant whose instruments were…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Some Criteria for a Power Producing Thermonuclear Reactor
J. D. Lawson · 1957
Derives the combination of plasma density, temperature and confinement time a fusion reactor needs to produce net power, giving the field a single…
+6 more at this level
12 of 13 works
United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Explains how a reactor actually controls a chain reaction — moderation, control rods, feedback — at the level the regulator expects its own inspectors to understand it, rather than at the level of a research physics course.
link checked 17 Sept 2026President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island
Finds the equipment failure survivable and the response not: operators trained to follow procedures could not diagnose a plant whose instruments were telling them something no procedure covered.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Department of Energy
Teaches the thermodynamics and heat-transfer calculations a reactor operator actually needs — boiling heat transfer, natural circulation, two-phase flow — at the level the DOE requires its own facility staff to master.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Department of Energy
Teaches radiation dose and shielding calculations from the physics of how radiation deposits energy in matter, at the level the DOE requires its own radiation workers to master before entering a controlled area.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Department of Energy
Evaluates whether burying the nation's spent nuclear fuel a thousand feet inside a volcanic ridge in the Nevada desert can be shown to isolate it from the environment for ten thousand years, and what would happen if the site assessment is wrong.
International Atomic Energy Agency
Catalogues small modular reactor designs worldwide to argue their case rests on factory fabrication and passive safety systems, not on any single new reactor physics, and tracks how far each design has actually progressed toward deployment.
link checked 17 Sept 2026J. D. Lawson
Derives the combination of plasma density, temperature and confinement time a fusion reactor needs to produce net power, giving the field a single number — the Lawson criterion — to design toward instead of a vague goal of hotter and denser.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Introduced fault-tree and event-tree quantification of reactor risk, founding probabilistic risk assessment; its headline numbers were later disowned by the commission that published it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James J. Duderstadt & Louis J. Hamilton
Derives reactor criticality and power distribution from neutron diffusion theory built up in stages, arguing that the multigroup diffusion approximation is precise enough for real reactor design despite ignoring the full transport equation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026D. R. Liles & J. H. Mahaffy
Documents a best-estimate two-fluid thermal-hydraulic code developed to replace conservative bounding assumptions in loss-of-coolant-accident analysis with physically realistic predictions of reactor behaviour.
Robert G. Cochran & Nicholas Tsoulfanidis
Treats the fuel cycle as one connected material-flow problem from ore to waste, arguing that a decision made at enrichment or reprocessing has consequences for waste management decades later that must be costed in from the start.
International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group
Revises the IAEA's own 1986 verdict, moving the weight of blame from operator error to a reactor design with a positive void coefficient and a shutdown rod that briefly added reactivity.
link checked 17 Sept 2026