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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.
John T. Mihalczo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 47 | Number 3 | March 1972 | Pages 290-301
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE72-A22415
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A series of dynamic measurements has been performed with a multiplying assembly in which a rotating beryllium reflector (worth 4.8 dollars in reactivity) moved past an unreflected core surface ∼60 times/sec at a speed of 264 m/sec. A pulse of 14.1-MeV neutrons was injected into the assembly each time the rotating reflector attained a position for which the reactivity of the assembly was maximum. The time distribution of neutrons after the injection of the pulse was measured in the core and adjacent to a 10.16- × 10.16- × 3.81-cm polyethylene scatterer which provided a pulse of thermal leakage neutrons. The maximum prompt-neutron multiplication of the assembly, which was reflected with iron on all sides but one and contained 58.6 kg of highly enriched uranium metal at delayed criticality, was varied from 75 to 285 by fuel loading changes. This assembly with a maximum prompt-neutron multiplication of 285 produced fast-neutron pulses with a width at half-maximum of 3.9 μsec, with a peak-to-minimum ratio of 12,400 and with 80% of the power in the pulse. These pulses, when thermalized by the scatterer, were broadened to a width at half-maximum of 20.9 μsec with a peak-to-minimum power ratio of 1590. The number of thermal neutrons leaking from the outer surface of the scatterer was 3.3 × 10−5 n/(cm2 fission).