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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.
Jorge Molina Avila, Maria Do Carmo Lopes
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 96 | Number 4 | August 1987 | Pages 310-317
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE87-A16394
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A previously developed formalism is applied to calculate the sensitivity of cobalt prompt response self-powered neutron detectors. Differential and average sensitivities in thermal and epithermal energy regions are calculated, and their dependence on the geometrical factors is studied. A simple analytical expression is proposed for the first-collision absorption probability, which is a good approximation to the exact function. This expression is used to obtain the epithermal selfshielding factor as a function of the radius of the emitter and the parameters of the interaction. The thermal sensitivity, as the main contributor to the current, is studied as a function of the emitter radius. Finally, a criterion to evaluate the accuracy of the parameters of the model is established in the form of some interval rule. This interval rule should encourage the performance of better measurements and calculations.