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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.
Robert A. Rice, Gary S. Chulick, Yeong E. Kim, Jin-Hee Yoon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 18 | Number 1 | August 1990 | Pages 147-150
Technical Note | Cold Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29241
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Reaction rates from recent electrochemical fusion experiments have been found to be as many as seventy orders of magnitude larger than those obtained from simple calculations involving an extrapolated low-energy deuterium-deuterium (D-D) cross section and a sharp velocity distribution. However, if an appropriate Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution is used in place of the conventional sharp (mono-energetic) velocity distribution, the calculated reaction rate increases by as much as fifty to sixty orders of magnitude. Furthermore, the center-of-mass energy at which the D-D cross section is evaluated for given D-D energy is much larger than that used in the conventional calculations due to the higher energy components in the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. Finally, the above results are not significantly affected if a reasonable high-energy cutoff Ec is included in the velocity distribution.