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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.
Brian C. Franke, Anil K. Prinja
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 149 | Number 1 | January 2005 | Pages 1-22
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE05-A2473
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present a computationally efficient single event Monte Carlo approach for calculating dose from electrons. Analog elastic scattering and inelastic energy-loss differential cross sections for electrons are converted into corresponding discrete cross sections that are constrained to exactly preserve low-order moments of the analog cross sections. While the method has been implemented and tested for the Rutherford model for scattering and energy loss, its dependence solely on cross-section moments makes our approach arbitrarily general.By comparison with analog Monte Carlo calculations, we demonstrate that few discrete angles and energies are required to achieve accurate dose distributions, and the calculations are fast. The method is capable of yielding accurate results across the entire spatial extent of the transport problem, from relatively isotropic scattering to highly forward-peaked scattering. We compare the accuracy of the angular approximation with the Goudsmit-Saunderson angular approximation commonly used by condensed history methods and similarly analyze the energy approximation. Finally, we present an investigation of the combined approximations and illustrate the accuracy of this method in the presence of a material interface. The computational efficiency of each method is explicitly compared using timing studies.