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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. Hemmendinger, C. E. Ragan, Jon M. Wallace
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 70 | Number 3 | June 1979 | Pages 274-280
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE79-A20148
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The specific production of tritium in a 600-mm-diam sphere of 6LiD irradiated by a central source of 14-MeV neutrons has been determined by measuring the tritium radioactivity in samples of 6LiH and 7LiH embedded in the sphere. Results are reported for several samples of each isotope at each of five different radii in the assembly. The entire process of decomposing the LiH samples, transferring the evolved gas into counters, and determining the decay rate was standardized by processing LiH samples irradiated by thermal neutrons, for which the 6Li(n,α) cross section is well known. These experiments provide benchmark measurements for checking calculations of neutron transport and tritium production in 6LiD. Tritium production in each ampule, as calculated using a three-dimensional Monte Carlo code, is in reasonable agreement with the experiment. For 7Li, discrepancies between calculation and experiment seem to be due to errors in the tritium production cross sections.