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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.
M. J. Barrett
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 14 | Number 2 | October 1962 | Pages 186-191
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE62-A28119
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The gamma current intensity (flux) and the gamma emission (leakage) of a homogeneous, spherical medium are derived by inserting a source spectrum in the Boltzmann transport equation. In the range of photon energies from 0.5 Mev to 10.5 Mev, Compton scattering by electrons of the medium dominates the energy degradation of photons, so that one may use Klein-Nishina cross sections for the transfer kernel. Lumping the flux into energy groups permits an approximation of the transport equation as a matrix equation. Numerical solutions for the flux and leakage spectra, found by inverting the matrix equation, agree well with the results of previous theoretical studies.