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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.
J. P. Chien and A. B. Smith
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 26 | Number 4 | December 1966 | Pages 500-510
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A18420
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Essentially monoenergetic neutrons are scattered from Be, Na, and Al at incident neutron energy intervals of ≲50 keV throughout the range 0.3 to 1.5 MeV. Fast neutron time-of-flight techniques are employed to measure the elastically and the inelastically scattered neutron angular distributions. Differential elastic cross sections are determined and the inelastic excitation cross sections of states in Al at 0.84 and 1.01 MeV and in Na at 0.44 MeV are measured. In addition, the total cross section of Al is measured from 0.3 to 1.5 MeV with resolutions o f ≳ l keV. The experimental results are related to the optical model and the Hauser-Feshbach theory of reaction processes. It is shown that these theoretical concepts can describe the scattering processes in Na and Al despite the marginal applicability of the theories to these light nuclei.