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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.
P. I. Johansson, B. Holmqvist
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 62 | Number 4 | April 1977 | Pages 695-708
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A15210
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The prompt fission neutron spectrum emitted by a sample of 235U irradiated with 0.53-MeV neutrons has been measured in the 0.6- to 15-MeV energy range by using time-of-flight (TOF) techniques. In the present work, a major effort was made to obtain an accurate experimental determination of the energy response and efficiency function of the neutron detector over the entire neutron energy range of interest. For this purpose, the TOF spectrometer was calibrated with respect to energy in the 0.5- to 21-MeV range by observing neutron groups from various nuclear reactions. The energy dependence of the neutron detector efficiency was determined by observing the angular distributions of the H(n,n)H process in the 1- to 15-MeV energy range. The overlapping 0.6- to 3-MeV energy range was covered by the T(p,n)3He reaction. The result of the fission neutron spectrum measurements has been used to find a suitable distribution function describing the data in the entire energy interval. The best description was obtained with the distribution N1(E) exp(–1.02E)sinh(2.32E)1/2.
