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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. Kenneth Shultis, R. E. Faw, M. S. Bassett
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 107 | Number 3 | March 1991 | Pages 228-245
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE91-A23787
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A refinement of a simplified method, based on line-beam response functions, is presented for performing skyshine calculations for shielded and collimated gamma-ray sources. New coefficients for an empirical fit to the line-beam response function are provided and a prescription for making the response function continuous in energy and emission direction is introduced. For a shielded source, exponential attenuation and a buildup factor correction for scattered photons in the shield are used. Results of the new integral line-beam method of calculation are compared to a variety of benchmark experimental data and calculations and are found to give generally excellent agreement at a small fraction of the computational expense required by other skyshine methods.