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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.
E. E. Lewis
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 25 | Number 4 | August 1966 | Pages 359-364
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A18554
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Dirac chord method is applied to the calculation of the escape probability of heavy charged particles from a uniform isotropic source of arbitrary convex geometry. This leads to the distribution of path lengths traveled by particles before escaping from the source. The path-length distribution, which is a function only of the Dirac chord distribution, may be used to average nuclear characteristics over the source geometry. As an illustration, the standard formula for the neutron-escape probability is reproduced. Expressions are then derived for the spectrum and energy self absorption of heavy-charged-particle sources. Specific results for spherical, slab, and cylindrical sources are obtained with the assumption that the range is proportional to an arbitrary power of the particle energy.