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Metz on Harold Denton: Memories of a life in nuclear safety
Metz
A number of years ago, historian and writer Chuck Metz Jr. was at the Bush’s Visitor Center in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains when he ran into former Nuclear Regulatory Commission official Harold Denton and his wife. Metz was at the visitor center, which opened in 2010 and is now a tourist hotspot, because, as he explained to the Dentons at the time, he had overseen the development of its on-site museum and had written a companion coffee-table history book.
The chance meeting turned into a friendship and a fruitful collaboration. Denton, who in 1979 was the public spokesperson for the NRC as the Three Mile Island-2 accident unfolded, had been working on his memoir, but he was stuck. He asked Metz for help with the organization and compilation of his notes. “I was about to retire,” Metz said, “but I thought that exploring the nuclear world might be an interesting change of pace.”
Denton passed away in 2017, but by then Metz had spent many hours with his fast friend and was able to complete the memoir, Three Mile Island and Beyond: Memories of a Life in Nuclear Safety, which was published recently by ANS. Metz shared some of his thoughts about Denton and the book with Nuclear News. The interview was conducted by NN’s David Strutz.
D. Yuan, P. Guss, T. Ashenfelter
Nuclear Technology | Volume 177 | Number 2 | February 2012 | Pages 273-284
Technical Paper | Radiation Measurements and General Instrumentation | dx.doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13371
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Past studies of wavelet technologies for gamma spectral analysis essentially focused on direct fitting of raw gamma spectra, but these studies often failed to produce new benefits for operational adaptation of wavelet analysis. This paper presents a modified wavelet approach with the objective being detecting only the nuclides that do not exist in the environmental background. With this operational objective, wavelet analysis is applied to the background-subtracted count-rate spectra. A preliminary comparison study suggests that this background subtraction - wavelet-fitting process - is independent of the detector type and background radiation and is capable of improving the wavelet peak detection probabilities as compared with earlier published results.
