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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.
A. Rastas, J. Saastamoinen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 36 | Number 3 | June 1969 | Pages 351-360
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE69-A18733
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutron rethermalization has been studied, experimentally and theoretically, in a system intended to reproduce the conditions of the Kottwitz problem. Terphenyl and light water were used as the moderators at the temperatures 223 and 11°C, respectively. The energy spectrum of the angle-dependent neutron flux perpendicular to the plane discontinuity was measured in terphenyl as a function of the distance from the discontinuity by means of an extraction channel and a choppertime-of-flight analyzer. The spatial behavior of the flux-weighted average energy was determined by fitting a Maxwellian to each measured spectrum using the method of the least squares. This spatial behavior could be satisfactorily described by a simple one-exponential function for distances exceeding 3 mm (measured from the discontinuity). The least-squares fit gave a value of 11.3 mm for the relaxation length. The theoretical calculations were performed by an approximate method using the “two overlapping-groups” approximation for the energy dependence. For the angular dependence of the flux, both the Pn(n =1,3)- and the DPn(n = 1)-approximation was used. Three different scattering models were used for each moderator. Rather good agreement with the theory and the experiment was achieved as to both the form of the spectrum and the spatial behavior of the average energy.