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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.
K. V. N. Sarma, K. Narasimha Murty, V. V. V. Subrahmanyam
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 61 | Number 2 | October 1976 | Pages 195-200
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE76-A27352
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The external bremsstrahlung (EB) spectra generated by the complete absorption of 91Y and 204Tl beta rays in aluminum, copper, tin, and lead are experimentally measured with a multi-channel NaI(Tl) scintillation spectrometer along with a suitable geometrical arrangement. After being corrected for different possible factors, the measured EB distributions are compared with the modified Bethe-Heitler theory. It is observed that except in the case of very light elements, like aluminum, where there is an exact coincidence between theory and experiment, in general, the experimental values are greater than the theoretical ones. This difference increases with increasing photon energy and also with increasing atomic number of the target element, an observation found to compare favorably with most of the earlier findings.