ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Latest Magazine Issues
Mar 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
April 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
Thomas E. Booth
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 104 | Number 4 | April 1990 | Pages 374-384
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE90-A23735
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The basic quasi-deterministic method provides an approximate importance function in arbitrary user-defined phase-space regions. The approximation is twofold. First, each region is averaged over and becomes a discrete state. Second, Monte Carlo methods estimate transport probabilities and scores between the discrete states. These two approximations lead to a set of linear equations for the state importances that can be deterministically solved. This new method is compared against the standard MCNP importance generator. A generalization of the method provides an importance function in the physical and random number spaces that may be useful for random number biasing techniques.