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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.
Hunter Belanger, Davide Mancusi, Amélie Rouchon, Andrea Zoia
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 4 | April 2023 | Pages 534-557
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2126719
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutron noise in nuclear power reactors refers to the small fluctuations around the average neutron flux at steady state resulting from time-dependent perturbations inside the core. The neutron noise equations in the frequency domain can be solved using Monte Carlo simulation codes, which are capable of obtaining reference solutions involving almost no approximations but are hindered by severe issues affecting the statistical convergence: The simultaneous presence of positive and negative particles, which is required by the nature of the complex noise equations, leads to catastrophically large variance in the tallies. In this work, we consider the important case of neutron noise problems induced by mechanical vibrations. First, we derive a new exact sampling strategy for the noise source. Then, building upon our previous findings in other contexts, we show that weight cancellation methods can be highly beneficial in dealing with the presence of negative weights, enabling extremely large gains in the figure of merit. We successfully demonstrate our results on a benchmark configuration consisting of a fuel assembly with a vibrating pin, and we discuss possible pathways for further improvements.