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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.
S. Plattard, J. Blons, D. Paya
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 61 | Number 4 | December 1976 | Pages 477-495
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE76-A14485
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The neutron-induced fission cross section of 237Np was measured between 3 eV and 2 MeV by the time-of-flight technique using a gas scintillator as a fission fragment detector. Two measurements were carried out with the Saclay 60-MeV Linac used as a pulsed-neutron source. The first measurement, with a nominal resolution of 2 ns/m, was performed in the 3-eV to 35-keV energy range, where the fission cross section exhibits the well-known intermediate structure. The samples were cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature to reduce the Doppler broadening predominant below 50 eV. Thanks to good statistics and to a very low background, a shape resonance analysis was possible up to 155 eV, the quoted uncertainties on the fission widths being essentially due to inaccurate neutron widths. The second experiment was run from 25 keV to 2 MeV, with a nominal resolution of 0.3 ns/m, and showed a structureless fission cross section. The agreement with the Physics 8 underground nuclear explosion data seems to be very poor in the resonance region, whereas it is more satisfactory for higher energies. Neptunium-238 fission barrier parameters were deduced from the collected data and agree fairly well with published results.