Projects and ideas presented here, are not in any particular order. These are not all projects that Matter Realisations has undertaken, but rather projects that the personnel of Matter Realisations have performed.
Some projects are listed in more than one place, because they are of a multi-disciplinary nature. Some sections of this page are strictly of an explanatory nature, and involve no project work.
Most people think power, when they think of nuclear. In terms of nuclear fission reactors, a reactor can be too small to produce power but still be useful. A SLOWPOKE is a Canadian designed, inherently safe, sub-critical assembly.
There is not enough material capable of sustaining a chain reaction involving the prompt, fast fission neutrons in a SLOWPOKE, regardless of geometry. A SLOWPOKE is only critical with respect to all neutrons regardless of speed, not the fast criticality of a bomb.
A SLOWPOKE at full power produces heat at a rate of 16 kW. The water temperature in the core at this power level, is a bit more than 50C in the middle of the heat of summer. If somehow one had access to a perfect heat engine which had its cold sink at the outside temperature in February, a SLOWPOKE might be able to generate 5 kW of work. Hooked up to a real electric generator, you might see 3 kW of electrical power. Something like 30 light bulbs. Not a lot of power.
There are many variations on Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA): instrumental (INAA), Comparator, Cyclic (CNAA), Epi-thermal, Delayed Neutron, etc. NAA is effectively a non-destructive means of estimating elemental composition. If you put a mole of atoms in the reactor for some length of time, and make 1E12 (1 trillion) radioactive nuclei, once the radioactivity has essentially decayed away (which could be soon), you would be hard pressed to be able to detect the changes in elemental composition induced. There are times where doing some kind of manipulation of the sample either before or after irradiation helps, but in general, nothing needs to be done to the sample.
Health physics is concerned with how physics things effect health. One big area, is how various kinds of radiation effect health. X-rays, gamma rays, alpha particles, beta particles, neutrons and cosmic rays are the kinds of radiation I needed to be aware of.
At moderate to high doses, the relationship between the common used definitions of radiation exposure and biological effect seem to be linear. That this relationship continues to be linear at low doses is often implied. Since we evolved in an environment which naturally contains radiation of various kinds, such a relationship may not necessarily be true at low doses. In any event, we should seek to minimize how much exposure people acquire.
A guiding principle is to keep exposures As Low As is Reasonably Achieavable (ALARA) through the use of Time, Distance and Shielding (TDS).