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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.
C. S. Barnett
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 50 | Number 4 | April 1973 | Pages 398-401
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE73-A26578
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Consider one-speed model neutron migration in an infinite homogeneous medium. Let a neutron be released from the origin at time zero. A probabilistic argument is used to show that without approximation the neutron’s mean square distance from the origin at time t, given that absorption has not occurred, is , where v is the neutron speed, λs is the scattering mean-free-path, and is the mean cosine of the scattering angle. The expression outside the brace is the diffusion theory result. For large t, the exact result tends to the diffusion theory result, while for small t, the exact result tends to (vt)2, an extreme nondiffusion result.