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Casting a wider net
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
Recently, a colleague related to me a conversation overheard at an industry forum in which ANS was referred to as a group of “academics” who were of limited use in expanding the workforce needed to deliver a nuclear resurgence.
While not new, this criticism still gets me hypertensive when I hear it. Many still see ANS as a bunch of academics and “labbies” disconnected from the day-to-day commercial nuclear race.
Yet, I also understand the charge is not entirely without foundation. Pop your head into a technical session at an ANS national conference, and you’re bound to hear academics presenting research that, to nontechnical ears, sounds esoteric.
Tejbir Singh, Updesh Kaur, Shivali Tandon, Parjit S. Singh
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 165 | Number 2 | June 2010 | Pages 240-244
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-35TN
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Photon interaction (ZPIeff) and photon energy absorption (ZPEAeff) effective atomic numbers have been computed for some amino acids, namely, alanine (C3H7NO2), arginine (C6H14N4O2), aspartic acid (C4H7NO4), glycine (C2H5NO2), isoleucine (C6H13NO2), serine (C3H7NO3), and valine (C5H11NO2) in the energy range of 1 keV to 20 MeV. It has been observed that the effective atomic numbers (photon interaction and photon energy absorption) for the selected amino acid differ only in the lower-energy region (5 to 100 keV) and the maximum deviation is observed at ˜30 keV. Further, the maximum values of the effective atomic numbers for photon interaction and photon energy absorption were observed to be at different energies. For the photon interaction effective atomic number, the maximum for the selected amino acids appears at ˜5 keV, whereas the photon energy absorption effective atomic number has its maximum for the selected amino acids at ˜15 keV. Among the selected amino acids, aspartic acid shows the maximum effective atomic number, whereas the least effective atomic numbers were observed for isoleucine.
