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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.
Yunhuang Zhang, Jean C. Ragusa, Jim E. Morel
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 10 | October 2020 | Pages 903-926
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1771141
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Simplified () approximation is often used to model radiation transport phenomena, but it converges to the true solution of the transport equation only in one-dimensional slab geometry. In all other geometries, it incurs a model error that needs to be quantified. In this paper, we estimate the radiation transport model error due to the approximation and employ transport solutions (with high order) as reference transport solutions. Because the solution does not contain the full angular information of the transport solution, an angular intensity must be reconstructed from the solution in order to compute the model error. We propose two such reconstruction schemes. Model error estimates are given for various quantities of interests, i.e., scalar radiation intensity, radiation flux, and boundary leakage. An adjoint-based approach is proposed to evaluate the model error and is compared against forward and residual techniques. Two-dimensional numerical experiments are presented.