this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Thank you very much for taking the time to wright all the above. A lot has been clarified and you gave me input to further my quest. Btw do you have any recent book/documentary/etc to suggest on the topic for a non-scientist reader?
I don't know much about lay person explanations of nuclear engineering that are accurate and accessible. I can perhaps recommend the textbooks I used in my major? Nuclear engineering is a cousin to mechanical engineering, so if you have a background in differential equations then you have all of the tools necessary to start learning the material. The physics of nuclear interactions are mostly abstracted away into tables and data, (such as the Evaluated Nuclear Data File (ENDF) which you can browse online here) so you don't need to learn Nuclear Physics beyond the complete basics.
The introductory course at my old university, which kind of discusses general things rather than specifics, uses "Nuclear Engineering Fundamentals" by Masterson. From here if you're specifically interested in nuclear reactors, you can study Radiation Physics (Turner's "Atoms, Radiation, and Radiation Profection"), and then Reactor Physics (Lamarsh's "Introduction to Nuclear Engineering" and Lewis's "Fundamental of Nuclear Reactor Physics" and Duderstadt's "Nuclear Reactor Analysis"). From there, if you have a background in Heat Transfer and Thermodynamics (very important) you can learn how practical (rather than abstract) reactors work using Todreas's Nuclear Systems I. This covers mostly PWRs and BWRs. Undergrad doesn't talk much in curriculum about other reactor types (Fluoride, Lead Eutectic, Breeders, etc) that's mostly Graduate material.
Please note this isn't a complete major, there's a lot of material about radiation protection and shielding and health effects and so on.
The Materson book was easy to find, which is great. The introductory course was a great idea, so I'll try to find free online lectures and take it from there (I do have some background in math, so differential equations won't be an issue). I'm pretty sure I won't get everything, but I'll get a better grasp. Well, an introductory grasp, that is and I'm fine with it. Thanks again for your input.