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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.
Charles Erwin Cohn
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 5 | Number 5 | May 1959 | Pages 331-335
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE59-A25605
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experimental investigation was made of the statistical fluctuations in neutron intensity which occur in a nuclear reactor. An ion chamber was exposed to reactor flux, and the fluctuations in its output current were analyzed in a tunable bandpass filter to get the frequency spectrum of these fluctuations, which has the shape of the square modulus of the transfer function. Results are presented of some measurements made on various low-power experimental reactors at Argonne National Laboratory. For reactors with prompt neutron lifetime between 15 and 70 μsec, the quantity l/β was determined within 5 per cent or better from a least squares fit to the transfer function thus measured.