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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.
Heinrich Hora, George H. Miley, Jak C. Kelly, Giovanna Salvaggi, Antonio Tate, Frederick Osman, Reynaldo Castillo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 36 | Number 3 | November 1999 | Pages 331-336
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A114
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The proton reactions in host metals like palladium, nickel, or titanium generate elements up to a proton number Z = 82 (lead), where the generation probability follows a kind of Boltzmann distribution. This is very similar to the standard abundance distribution of the elements in the universe for heavy elements. The analogy leads to a relation to the magic numbers of the nuclear shell model, to its alternative (more general) foundation on the Bagge series contrary to the spin model of Jensen and Goeppert-Mayer, and to new large magic numbers in agreement with Greiner et al.'s results on superheavy elements.