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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.
S. B. Gunst, E. D. McGarry, J. J. Scoville
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 7 | Number 5 | May 1960 | Pages 407-418
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE60-A25738
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Natural uranium dioxide specimens of Shippingport PWR-l blanket-rod geometry are exposed in the Materials Testing Reactor (flux 2 × 1014 n/cm2−sec) and discharged periodically (every three weeks) for measurements in the Reactivity Measurement Facility (RMF). The time-integrated thermal and epithermal fluxes are measured during each exposure cycle, and together with the MTR Daily Power Logs, give the complete exposure history. Measurements in the RMF are used to determine an experimental value for η/η0 (η0 is the preirradiation value) which may be compared with the theoretical η/η0 calculated for the measured exposure history using appropriate neutron-interaction parameters. In the theoretical calculations, the thermal absorption cross section of stable fission products is taken to be 50 barns per fission. Although the experimental and theoretical results are derived completely independently, agreement within 1 % in η/η0 is found for the behavior following all cycles of irradiation comprising exposures from zero to 15,600 Mwd/ton.