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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.
K. Wisshak, F. Käppeler
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 77 | Number 1 | January 1981 | Pages 58-70
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE81-A21339
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The neutron capture width of the 27.7-keV s-wave resonance in 56Fe has been determined using a setup completely different from most of the previous experiments. A pulsed 3-MV Van de Graaff accelerator and the 7Li(p,n) reaction served as a neutron source. Capture gamma rays were observed by a Moxon-Rae detector and gold was used as a standard. The samples were positioned at a flight path of only 7.6 to 8.0 cm. This allowed the use of very thin samples avoiding large multiple scattering corrections. Three metallic disks enriched in 56Fe were used with a thickness between 0.6 and 0.15 mm. Events due to capture of resonance scattered neutrons in the detector or surrounding material were completely eliminated by time-of-flight. The result for the capture width is Γγ = 1.01 eV with a statistical uncertainty of 1.3% and a systematic uncertainty of ∼5%.