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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. B. Chilton
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 21 | Number 2 | February 1965 | Pages 194-200
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE65-A21043
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Backscattering factors, as fractions of the direct dose rate, are obtained for point sources of gamma radiation, specifically Cs137 and Co60, placed near a plane interface between vacuum and concrete. The method is based on the application of albedo principles, using the Chilton-Huddleston formulation for albedo. The results are considered practically applicable to air-concrete or air-ground interface situations, provided the source-detector, source-interface, and detector-interface distances are within certain limits. The lower limit is in theory the order of a mean free path of the source radiation in concrete, although under certain circumstances the present results are valid for distances even less. The upper limit appears to be on the order of a few dozen feet, but further precise experimental work is needed to establish this.