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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.
J. A. Lake, J. M. Kallfelz
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 53 | Number 1 | January 1974 | Pages 27-46
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE74-A23328
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Thermal-neutron energy spectra have been measured as a function of trans-verse buckling and of space position along the longitudinal axes of 25.4- × 25.4-and 35.6- × 35.6-cm beryllium assemblies by the slow-chopper, time-of-flight technique using the thermal column of the Georgia Tech Research Reactor as the steady-state neutron source. For neutrons moving in the (forward) positive Z direction, we find no evidence of the establishment of, or the tendency toward, discrete asymptotic decay conditions from the strongly space-dependent spectra in either assembly. This is a direct experimental verification of the disappearance of the discrete set of eigenvalues and eigenfunctions in the diffusion-length problem with transverse leakage. These results are in at least qualitative agreement with the transport theory predictions of Williams, but in disagreement with the diffusion theory results of Ahmed, Kothari, and Kumar which predict that a true discrete mode should exist in beryllium assemblies as small as 30 × 30 cm.