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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.
Sagid Salah and T. F. Parkinson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 26 | Number 1 | September 1966 | Pages 59-66
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A17187
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have measured the thermal-neutron spectrum throughout the unit cell of several D 20-moderated natural-uranium lattices using both differential and integral methods. For the differential measurements the neutron diffraction method was used, and for the integral measurements, space-dependent spectra were deduced from activation of gold and lutetium detectors. To obviate the numerous corrections normally required for the diffraction method, the total efficiency of the crystal spectrometer was determined using a beam with a known spectrum from a D2O thermal column. Satisfactory agreement was found between the activation measurements and theoretical results obtained with the THERMOS Code. However, effective neutron temperature changes derived from the differential spectra were systematically lower than the THERMOS calculations. Some uncertainty remains as to the precision of the differential spectra due to the method of calibration and the perturbing effect of the beam tube. Nevertheless, most of the measured spectra are in reasonably good agreement with calculated spectra.