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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.
R. L. Perel, J. J. Wagschal, Y. Yeivin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 124 | Number 1 | September 1996 | Pages 197-209
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE96-A24235
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Hall’s differential operator method for the Monte Carlo calculation of sensitivities was extended so as to apply to point-detector-type problems. By this method, the evaluation of the sensitivities of the detector response (or, equivalently, those of the neutron flux at the detector) to material parameters of interest (cross sections, average number of fission neutrons, number densities) is concurrent with that of the very response. In such a Monte Carlo game, the neutron histories, or paths, are sampled, collision by collision, and the calculated contributions of each collision to the response and to its partial derivatives with respect to the parameters of interest are accumulated. For each path, these sums are the estimates for the response and its respective sensitivities. The Monte Carlo evaluations are then the respective averages of the individual path estimates. This procedure was applied to the analysis of the time-of-flight spectra of the leakage from several of the Livermore pulsed spheres. As an illustration, measured and calculated spectra and some calculated sensitivities are depicted and discussed.