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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.
Massimo A. Larsen, Simon Bolding, Todd Palmer, Jim Morel
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 3 | March 2026 | Pages 525-538
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2495608
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Residual Monte Carlo (RMC) methods have been previously used in neutron transport for monoenergetic and multigroup problems. In this paper, we implement an RMC algorithm for solving continuous energy problems with elastic scattering functions. We use a piecewise constant finite-element trial space to approximate the transport solution and build the residual representation. Because of the complexity of the scattering term, an analytic distribution cannot be computed for the residual; instead, we sample source particles directly from the scattering integrand using unnormalized importance sampling. We achieve exponentially convergent Monte Carlo (MC) with the use of an additional weight cancellation technique to reduce the magnitude of particle weights. We then demonstrate the algorithm on continuous energy problems and compare the results with standard MC simulations to demonstrate the increased efficiency of the RMC method.