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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.
Pratibha Yadav, Reuven Rachamin, Jörg Konheiser, Silvio Baier
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 2 | February 2024 | Pages 497-507
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2211199
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In nuclear engineering, Monte Carlo (MC) methods are commonly used for reactor analysis and radiation shielding problems. These methods are capable of dealing with both simple and complex system models with accuracy. The application of MC methods experiences challenges when dealing with the deep penetration problems that are typically encountered in radiation shielding cases. It is difficult to produce statistically reliable results due to poor particle sampling in the region of interest. Therefore, such calculations are performed by the Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport (MCNP) code in association with the weight window (WW) variance reduction technique, which increases the particle statistics in the desired tally region. However, for large problems, MCNP’s built-in weight window generator (WWG) produces zero WW parameters for tally regions located far from the source. To address this issue, the recursive Monte Carlo (RMC) method was proposed. This paper focuses on the RMC methodology and its implementation in the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf’s (HZDR’s) in-house code TRAWEI, which is responsible for producing optimal zone weight parameters used for optimizing deep penetration MC calculations. In addition, this paper discusses the verification of the TRAWEI weight generator program to that of an existing MCNP WWG. The performance of TRAWEI-generated weight values is assessed using a handful of test cases involving two shield materials. Globally, the TRAWEI-generated weight values improved not only the statistical variance and computational efficiency of the MC run compared to the analog MCNP simulation but also those of the simulation with WW values generated by the standard MCNP WWG.