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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.
Hugh F. Henry
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 72 | Number 1 | October 1979 | Pages 65-74
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A19309
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The radiative capture of unidirectional neutrons by the individual components of a stack of cadmium-covered gold foils was investigated for several spectra, principally those obtained by various modifications of the emission from a 252Cf source. The relative experimental activation of the foils was empirically described by a simple three-group relation reflecting capture in the 5-eV resonance, the 60-eV resonance, and an “average” of other capture regions. The incident fluxes in these respective regions could then be identified, and it was shown that the relative activations of the individual foils due to neutrons in these three energy regions depended on the incident spectrum. The energy dependence of the flux in the 5- to 60-eV range was also empirically shown to depend on the neutron spectrum.