Episode 17: Nuclear reactor modelling
This week the topic was mathematical modelling and linear programming. We interviewed Rick Crawford from AMEC, who’s a mathematician studying decommissioning of nuclear reactors, and using mathematical models to determine whether it’s safe to continue using a particular reactor given that it may have degraded over time, but without actually building a physical model of it.
Interesting links:
- Nuclear Power Plant at HowStuffWorks
- Mathematical model on Wikipedia
- Small angle approximation at John Cook's blog The Endeavour
- Linear programming at Purple Math
Puzzle: A rod sits inside a cylindrical tube of the same height. The tube is 193mm tall, and 50mm in diameter. We assume the rod has zero thickness. What’s the maximum angle away from vertical that the rod can make (to the nearest degree)?
Solution: