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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.
Richard Sanchez, Li Mao, Simone Santandrea
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 140 | Number 1 | January 2002 | Pages 23-50
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE140-23
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Boundary conditions are an essential part of the approximations used in the numerical solution of the transport equation. The collision probability and the characteristic methods are considered, and exact and approximated tracking methods to be used in the implementation of geometrical motions and albedo conditions are analyzed. The analysis of the exact boundary-condition treatment is carried out for finite domains and infinite lattices, where periodic trajectories must be used. Albedo-like boundary conditions may be used to approximate exact geometrical motions via spatially piecewise constant and either piecewise constant or discrete angular approximations for the boundary fluxes. We also have examined angular product quadrature formulas and shown that the recently proposed Bickley-Naylor quadratures do not respect particle conservation in the presence of anisotropy of scattering. Numerical examples show that the approximated albedo-type boundary method converges toward the results obtained with the exact boundary treatment. However, because of problems related to the multigroup implementation, numerical extra burden in group iterations prevents the efficient use of approximated boundary conditions for multigroup calculations. Nevertheless, this method remains a candidate of choice for use in multidomain calculations via interface boundary fluxes.