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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.
John T. Mihalczo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 27 | Number 3 | March 1967 | Pages 557-563
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE86-A17621
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method is described for predicting the neutron multiplication factors of geometrically complicated configurations of unreflected unmoderated enriched- uranium metal from the results of two delayed-critical experiments in simple geometry. The method requires two constants characteristic of the metal. These are the total collision cross section (∑t) and the number of neutrons produced per collision (υ∑f/∑t), which are obtained from the two experiments by using S12 transport-theory calculations with isotropic scattering. These constants, together with the assumption of isotropic scattering, are then used in 05R Monte Carlo neutron-transport calculations to predict the multiplication factors. The method has been tested by predicting the multiplication factors of 21 different delayed-critical assemblies with a wide variety of geometries to within a standard deviation of 1.5%.