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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. Märten, D. Richter, D. Seeliger, W. D. Fromm, R. Böttger, H. Klein
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 106 | Number 3 | November 1990 | Pages 353-366
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE90-A29063
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The 252Cf neutron spectrum is measured at high energies with a miniature ionization chamber and two different NE-213 neutron detectors. The gamma-ray background and the main cosmic background caused by muons were suppressed by applying efficient pulse-shape discrimination. On the basis of two-dimensional spectroscopy of the neutron time-of-flight and scintillation pulse height, the sliding bias method is used to minimize experimental uncertainties. The experimental data, corrected for several systematic influences, confirm earlier results that show negative deviations from a reference Maxwellian distribution with a 1.42-MeV spectrum “temperature” for neutron energies above 6 MeV. Experimental results of this work are compared with various statistical model approaches to the 252Cf(sf) neutron spectrum.