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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.
Thomas E. Booth, Harvey J. Amster
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 65 | Number 2 | February 1978 | Pages 273-281
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE78-A27156
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Present theories for predicting expected Monte Carlo errors in neutron transport calculations apply to estimates of flux-weighted integrals sampled directly by scoring individual collisions. To treat track-length estimators, the recent theory of Amster and Djomehri is generalized to allow the score distribution functions to depend on the coordinates of two successive collisions. It has long been known that the expected track length in a region of phase space equals the expected flux integrated over that region, but that the expected statistical error of the Monte Carlo estimate of the track length is different from that of the flux integral obtained by sampling the sum of the reciprocals of the total cross sections for all collisions in the region. These conclusions are shown to be implied by the generalized theory, which provides explicit equations for the expected values and errors of both types of estimators. Sampling expected contributions to the track-length estimator is also treated. Other general properties of the errors for both estimators are derived from the equations and physically interpreted. The actual values of these errors are then obtained and interpreted for a simple specific example.