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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.
Henry Lichtenstein
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 133 | Number 3 | November 1999 | Pages 258-268
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-A2086
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An adaptive reduced-source approach is utilized for a Monte Carlo transport solution for the one-speed finite slab problem in [x,] geometry. Although a solution for the underlying problem has been available to arbitrary precision for some time, the purpose here is to demonstrate how the convergence afforded by traditional (nonadaptive) Monte Carlo can be improved significantly, without compromising its precision. It is demonstrated that the reduced-source Monte Carlo technique obtains multiple-orders-of-magnitude improvement over traditional Monte Carlo convergence for the two-dimensional transport problem treated. The goal is that ongoing research will obtain exponential convergence for practical applications that are not tractable with methodology currently available.