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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.
Ruixian Fang, Dan G. Cacuci
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 8 | August 2024 | Pages 1682-1737
Computer Code Abstract | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2255725
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents a software module called 4th-Order-SENS, which enables the efficient computation of exactly obtained expressions for all sensitivities, up to and including the 4th order, of a functional of the particle flux (e.g., the leakage of particles out of a body) with respect to nuclear parameters (total, scattering, and fission cross sections; nu, chi, sources; and number densities) for systems modeled by the neutron transport equation. The 4th-Order-SENS module implements the nth-Order Comprehensive Adjoint Sensitivity Analysis Methodology for Linear Systems (nth-CASAM-L), which is the only practically implementable methodology for obtaining the exact expressions of arbitrarily high-order sensitivities of model responses to model parameters, for response-coupled forward/adjoint large-scale linear systems. In addition to presenting the equations that are solved to obtain the 1st-order through 4th-order sensitivities, this work also describes the components of the module 4th-Order-SENS, including the user interface, input file, output files, and several independent code verification capabilities using symmetries and/or finite-difference formulas. The 4th-Order-SENS module is written in Python and Fortran and runs on Linux platforms. Several illustrative applications involving fixed-source problems in one-dimensional spherical and slab geometries are also presented.