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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.
Sam Pasmann, Ilham Variansyah, C. T. Kelley, Ryan McClarren
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 6 | June 2023 | Pages 1159-1173
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2143704
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work we investigate replacing standard quadrature techniques used in deterministic linear solvers with a fixed-seed Quasi–Monte Carlo (QMC) calculation to obtain more accurate and efficient solutions to the neutron transport equation (NTE). QMC is the use of low-discrepancy sequences to sample the phase-space in place of pseudorandom number generators used by traditional Monte Carlo (MC). QMC techniques decrease the variance in the stochastic transport sweep and therefore increase the accuracy of the iterative method. Historically, QMC has largely been ignored by the particle transport community because it breaks the Markovian assumption needed to model scattering in analog MC particle simulations. However, by using iterative methods the NTE can be modeled as a pure-absorption problem. This removes the need to explicitly model particle scattering and provides an application well suited for QMC. To obtain solutions we experimented with three separate iterative solvers: the standard Source Iteration (SI) Solver and two linear Krylov Solvers, i.e., the Generalized Minimal RESidual method (GMRES) and the BiConjugate Gradient STABilized method (BiCGSTAB). The resulting hybrid iterative-QMC solver was assessed on three slab geometry problems of one dimension. In each sample problem the Krylov Solvers achieve convergence with far fewer iterations (up to eight times) than the SI Solver. Regardless of the linear solver used, the hybrid method achieved an approximate convergence rate of as compared to the expected of traditional MC simulation across all test problems.