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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.
Martin LeimdÖRfer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 17 | Number 3 | November 1963 | Pages 357-364
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE63-A17383
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Monte Carlo method has been applied to the calculation of the energy flux of scattered gamma radiation in a spherical room surrounded by an infinitely thick spherical wall and with a point source at the center. Source energies were 1, 2, 4, 6, and 10 Mev. The main investigation was carried out at a room radius of 500 cm but, for the 1 Mev source, the influence of varying the room radius down to 1 cm was analyzed. The results contain energy distributions of the first four successive reflection components at the center of the room and at the wall surface, as well as spatial distributions of the successive energy flux components. The neglect of reflection contributions of order five and higher was estimated to introduce an error of less than 0.2% of the total scattered energy flux. An analytical approximation is shown to produce a useful and easily applicable method of predicting the amount of scattered radiation in a spherical room.