Nuclear Power and Apple Pie

Barry D. Ganapol

Professor

Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

University of Arizona

The well-known astrophysicist Carl Segan once quipped

“If you wish to make anapple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

Indeed, if you invent the universe, then you also invent nuclear power, which is what my seminar is all about. To fully explore the nuclear power concept, we must begin with the Big Bang from which all nuclei were created in the process callednucleosynthesis. It all began in a blink of an eye when a primordialquark-gluon plasmacame into existence, followed by a rapid expansion, calledinflation. The quarks initially condensed intoneutronsandprotonsheld together by thestrong nuclear force, eventually forming Deuterium and Helium--et voilà,about 13.8 billion years later, the Earth appears. With star formation, some 500 million years after the Big Bang, Carbon and heavier nuclei through Iron were produced byfusion. As the large stars exploded insupernovae, all elements up through Uranium formed and spread out into the vast expanse. The neutron, being a neutral particle, is key to unlocking the energy of formation stored within the nuclei of heavy atoms, in particular Uranium and Plutonium, and therefore, is responsible for nuclear power generation. In 1941, Enrico Fermi, the brilliant Italian-American physicist, under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, produced the second known sustained nuclear chain reaction-and the nuclear age was born--again. We conclude with a word on the development of nuclear power and my role as one who solves the neutron transport equation.

报告人简介：

Barry D. Ganapolis currently Professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering (AME) at the UniversityofArizonaand a Research Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at theUniversityofTennessee. He received his PhD from theUniversityofCalifornia,Berkeleyin 1971 followed by two years at the Swiss Federal Institute for Reactor Research and one year at the Center for Nuclear Studies at Saclay inFrance. After three years at Argonne National Laboratory, he joined the Department of Nuclear Engineering (NE) faculty at theUniversityofArizonain 1976. Professor Ganapol has served as Chair of the NE Department and Acting and Associate Chair of the AME Department. His research interests include developing analytical and numerical methods to solve the neutron Boltzmann equation in the pursuit of high quality benchmark solutions. This activity has lead to his broader interest of verification and validation strategies applied to modeling and simulation of nuclear systems. In addition to his nuclear interests, Professor Ganapol has investigated the health of vegetation canopies from first principles of radiative transfer with application to satellite remote sensing. During his 30-year career, Professor Ganapol has held appointments at eleven DoE, NASA and military research laboratories and published over 275 articles. In addition, he is Fellow of the American Nuclear Society and recent recipient of the Gerald C. Pomraning Award from the Mathematics and Computation Division of the American Nuclear Society for his outstanding contributions to transport theory. In 2006, Professor Ganapol received the Da Vinci Award for excellence in overall scholarship, teaching and service from theCollegeofEngineeringat theUniversityofArizona.