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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.
Wallace Davis, Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 14 | Number 2 | October 1962 | Pages 174-178
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE62-A28117
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Some of the published data on the extraction of nitric acid from aqueous solutions, containing ≦5 M acid, by tributyl phosphate-hydrocarbon diluent solutions were tested for their agreement with a mathematical description presented in Part 1. In all cases the agreement of the literature data with this description ranged from adequate to very good, thereby adding support to the interpretation of the parameters of the equation in terms of the equilibrium constant, , for the extraction reaction and the two activity coefficients y′T and . The form of the mathematics suggests that TBP and TBP·H2O are indistinguishable in their reaction with HNO3 and that y′T is an approximate mean molar activity coefficient of these two in the water-saturated system; similarly, is an approximate mean molar activity coefficient of the two species TBP·HNO3 and TBP·HNO3H2O. The quantity has a value of ∼1.5 in molar units for diluent-free TBP; its extrapolated value in the pure diluent Amsco 125-82, or odorless kerosene, is ∼0.23, while its value in n-hexane is ∼0.27.