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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.
Amos Notea, Yitzhak Segal
Nuclear Technology | Volume 63 | Number 1 | October 1983 | Pages 121-128
Technical Paper | Radioisotopes and Isotope | doi.org/10.13182/NT83-A33308
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The characteristic functions of dynamic gauges, based on nuclear or atomic radiation, were developed. These gauges are applied to the examination of material whose properties may vary continuously with time. The approach presented takes into consideration contributions to the uncertainty and blurring from various effects, such as radiation scattering, gauge geometry, and the system’s time constant. The analysis is based on the concept of the line spread function obtained from the derivation of the response to a step change in the inspected property. The response and relative resolving functions were demonstrated for a rectangular change with a gamma-through transmission gauge. The procedure provides a systematic method of obtaining the optimal values for the design parameters of the radio gauge, such as radiation energy, source emission rate, detection efficiency, detector-sample distance, and measurement time. The time constant, for example, reveals a pronounced minimal value for large relative velocity. Due to the radiation scattering in the examined material, there is an advantage to large detector-material distance. The design values may differ considerably more for the dynamic gauge than for a static gauge, i.e., a gauge applied to samples whose properties do not vary during the measurement period.