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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.
Kazuo Shin, Hideo Hirayama
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 120 | Number 3 | July 1995 | Pages 211-222
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A24120
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An approximating formula recently proposed by the authors for gamma-ray buildup factors of multilayered shields is applied to point isotropic source problems.The formula, which is formulated in vector form with a four-group approximation, handles the gamma-ray energy spectrum directly and uses the transmission and albedo matrices to take gamma-ray transmission and back-scattering effects into consideration. The gamma-ray transmission and back-scattering probabilities through a 1-mean-free-path- (mfp-) thick shell depend on the shell curvature. This phenomenon plays an important role in simulating the gamma-ray buildup factor in point isotropic source geometry. In this model, the dependence is described by simplified expressions. The feasibility of the formula for systematically describing the point isotropic buildup factors was tested by using buildup factors calculated by the Monte Carlo method as reference data. The materials used in the tests were water, iron, and lead, and the source energies assumed were 0.5, 1, and 10MeV. Through the tests, the method was found to reproduce the reference data of double-layered shields of these materials very well. With the same parameters, the buildup factors of three-layered shields are also reproducible. Buildup factors computed with two different group structures were examined to test the adequacy of the energy group structure adopted. The group structure previously adopted was found to be adequate in the energy range of 0.5 to 10 MeV