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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.
G. P. Cavanaugh, A. B. Chilton
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 53 | Number 2 | February 1974 | Pages 256-261
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE74-A23349
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In solving photon transport problems by the Monte Carlo method, parallel-type computers are not well suited to the use of the customary rejection technique for selecting photon wavelength upon scattering. Two techniques of determined length and therefore greater suitability have been studied, with particular application to a machine having 64 processing elements, such as ILLIAC IV. The method involving solutions by Newton’s method of the exact equation derived from the Klein-Nishina formula is found to be still more time-consuming than the rejection technique on both sequential and parallel computers. However, newly devised approximation formulas, corrected by weight adjustment factors, have been found to be much quicker on a parallel computer than the rejection technique, and even competitive on a sequential computer.