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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.
M. M. R. Williams
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 3 | March 1967 | Pages 511-519
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE86-A17616
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The nonabsorbing thermal-neutron Milne problem is solved for isotropic scattering in the laboratory system. The scattering kernel has been approximated by a two-term degenerate sum and the resulting equations are solved by analytic continuation, together with Wiener-Hopf factorization. The solution so obtained is not explicit in the sense of quadratures, but is in the form of a nonsingular Fredholm equation, which is ideally suited to solution by iteration once certain generalized energy-dependent H-functions have been tabulated. The energy transfer properties of the approximate kernel are discussed, and their effect on the structure of the total flux evaluated. In general, the complete solution consists of an asymptotic part, together with a rethermalization term, which is connected intimately with the energy exchange process, and the integral transient which depends markedly on the variation of the total cross section with energy. It is shown that, when the cross section is constant, the rethermalization term becomes zero and the solution reverts to the one-velocity one, multiplied by a Maxwellian. Certain properties of the energy-dependent H-functions are discussed in the Appendix.