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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
C. R. Gould, A. I. Hawari, E. I. Sharapov
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 165 | Number 2 | June 2010 | Pages 200-209
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-48
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We revisit the determination by Bowman et al. of unusual neutron transport characteristics for a newly fabricated form of graphite [Nucl. Sci. Eng., 159, 182 (2008); Nucl. Sci. Eng., 161, 68 (2009)]. From MCNP modeling and consideration of data from other experiments, we determine revised values for the neutron transport parameters of this graphite. Our reanalysis gives a coherent scattering cross section coh ˜ 4 b at 50 meV, a small-angle neutron scattering cross section sans ˜ 11 to 13 b at 1 meV, and an effective capture cross section a = 5.8 ± 0.5 mb. Scaled to a graphite reference density of 1.60 g/cm3 , we find a diffusion coefficient [overbar D] = 0.94 ± 0.03 cm and a diffusion length L = 47.7 ± 3.7 cm. Apart from the somewhat larger values of a and [overbar D], these are not untypical parameters for graphite. Based on our investigation, the recent experiments and analysis of Bowman et al. do not give evidence for different transport properties for this newly fabricated graphite.