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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.
B. E. Simmons, J. S. King
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 3 | Number 5 | May 1958 | Pages 595-608
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE3-595-608
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
If a burst of neutrons is injected into a reactor, the rate of prompt decay of the resultant flux should be proportional to the reactivity in dollars as measured from prompt critical. The proportionality constant is the ratio of the effective delayed neutron fraction to the prompt neutron generation time and can be determined by pulsing the reactor at (delayed) critical. Experiments with distributed poison in several highly enriched, hydrogen-moderated critical assemblies indicate that such pulsed reactivity measurements are reliable at least as far as