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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.
Yoshiaki Oka, Shigehiro An, Shigeru Kasai, Shun-ichi Miyasaka, Kinji Koyama
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 73 | Number 3 | March 1980 | Pages 259-273
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE80-A19850
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Measurements of neutron and gamma-ray penetrations in an iron shield were performed up to a 60-cm depth in a tightly coupled source shield configuration with the fast-neutron reactor YAYOI as a source. Rates of neutron reactions and gamma-ray dose rates in the iron shield were obtained using activation foils and thermoluminescent dosimeters. Analyses of the experiments were made by using the DOT-III code with coupled neutron and gamma-ray cross sections from ENDF/B-IV and POPOP4 libraries. To obtain the source condition for the iron shield analyses, the calculated spectrum was adjusted to the measured reaction rates at the reactor shield boundary. The calculated neutron and gamma-ray distributions in the iron shield show fairly good agreement with the experiments. The effect of difference in Bondarenko-type self-shielding factors on the analyses of the iron shield is also shown.