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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.
Iván Lux
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 82 | Number 3 | December 1982 | Pages 332-337
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE82-A19394
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The discrete angle technique is a customary method for selecting scattering angles from such scattering laws that are given through their Legendre coefficients up to some finite order. In this technique, discrete scattering angles are selected with certain probabilities. In low-order Pn truncations, however, this method can lead to unwanted ray effects during the first few free flights of the random walk. We propose a method in which a linear combination of some arbitrary density function, having the same first 2n moments as the truncated expansion, and of a discrete density function will yield samples that conserve the first (2n + 2) moments of the truncated series. Bounds are derived on the possible ranges of the combination coefficient. The method is applied to construct a semicontinuous density function (continuous + Dirac delta functions) having the first four moments prescribed, i.e., being given by its first three Legendre coefficients.