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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.
M. Drosg, R. Avalos Ortiz, P. W. Lisowski
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 172 | Number 1 | September 2012 | Pages 87-101
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-66
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Much of the absolute differential cross-section data for elastic scattering by 3He depends on an experiment at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), published in 1974. Since that time, computer techniques have been developed that can make more accurate corrections for, e.g., sample-size effects. Since complete documentation of the LANL experiment is available, modern analysis techniques were applied to improve these data, based on simulations using the Los Alamos Monte Carlo neutron transport code MCNPX. Of a total of 29 published differential cross-section distributions, 15 published in 1982 from another laboratory depend on the LANL data but were not corrected for sample-size effects and therefore provide only relative yield functions. The present study simulates these latter data using MCNPX to obtain self-attenuation correction factors for the scattered neutrons. An energy-dependent analysis shows that at neutron energies between 5 and 14 MeV, these latter corrected data are in good agreement with the other data, whereas above 22 MeV they are not. A complete energy-dependent analysis of all absolute differential cross sections between 5 and 23.7 MeV is presented.