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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. U. Rehman, D. G. Andrews
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 52 | Number 3 | November 1973 | Pages 321-329
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE73-A19479
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The thermalization of neutrons was experimentally measured for the purpose of testing Kushneriuk’s thermalization calculation in a cylindrical shell of moderator surrounding a fuel rod in a thermal reactor. The basis of this study was the measurement of activations for a set of five detectors—55Mn, 197Au, 115In, 239Pu, and 176Lu—inside the central fuel rod and the surrounding moderator at 20-cm hexagonal lattice pitch in the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.’s (AECL’s) heavy-water-moderated, natural uranium critical reactor, ZEEP. The neutron flux distribution, calculated by Kushneriuk’s method (first-order and exact solutions), was used in calculating detector activations. When compared, the measured detector activations and those calculated showed good agreement in the moderator, with the exception of points near and inside the fuel rod. The measured detector activations were also compared with the predicted values obtained from the HAMMER code. In this instance, the agreement was generally better than that obtained between measured and calculated values based on Kushneriuk’s method.