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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.
Adam Davis, Donald J. Dudziak, Drew E. Kornreich
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 1 | September 2014 | Pages 42-56
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-10
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Photon buildup factors provide a convenient method for radiation protection professionals to calculate dose and exposure behind various shielding configurations. Examination of buildup factors can also provide insight into the behavior of photons in these shields. Recent work has developed dual-layer buildup factors for several shielding configurations and a limited number of energies while slant-path buildup factors have been developed for single-layer shields. This work develops slant-path buildup factors for slab-geometric, dual-layer shields comprising polyethylene and lead at 25 energies conforming to the energies used in the buildup factor standard ANSI/ANS-6.4.3-1991 (W2001), “Gamma-Ray Attenuation Coefficients and Buildup Factors for Engineering Materials,” between 10 keV and 10 MeV. Further, the increased energy resolution of the calculations performed in this work allows the energy at which the previously identified “buildup reversal” phenomenon occurs to be more precisely identified. The effect of mesh spacing and quadrature resolution on fluence through the shields is also considered.