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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.
H. Alan Robitaille, John S. Hewitt
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 63 | Number 4 | August 1977 | Pages 391-400
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A27056
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The spectrum of neutrons in thermal pseudo-equilibrium with a mixture of partially hydrogenated terphenyls and high-boiling polymers, an organic material known commercially as HB40, has been measured at room temperature. The spectrum was measured in each of seven mixtures of HB40 and a thermal-neutron absorber, trimethyl borate, in various concentrations. The spectra were determined by the time-of-flight method using the University of Toronto linear electron accelerator as a pulsed source of fast neutrons. These spectra were compared with those calculated using several different bound-hydrogen approximations to the actual energy transfer kernel for the mixture. Of these approximations, the best agreement between theory and experiment occurred for a scattering kernel derived using the diphenyl and the polyethylene scattering kernels, combined according to a weighting scheme reflecting the degree of hydrogenation of the organic material.