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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.
P. E. Labeau
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 126 | Number 2 | June 1997 | Pages 131-145
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A24467
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Probabilistic dynamics offers a general Markovian framework for a dynamic treatment of reliability. Monte Carlo simulation appears to be a powerful and flexible tool to deal with the high dimensionality of realistic applications. Yet an analog game turns out to be ineffective for two main reasons: Very rare events leading to failures are not sampled enough to obtain a good statistical accuracy, and the equations of the dynamics have to be integrated all along each history, which results in very large computation times. Recent improvements in Monte Carlo simulation applied to probabilistic dynamics allow a much faster and more precise estimation of the unreliability of large systems, and they are illustrated on a pressurized water reactor pressurizer.