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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.
Stefano Riva, Sophie Deanesi, Carolina Introini, Stefano Lorenzi, Antonio Cammi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 1 | March 2026 | Pages S63-S76
Review Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2531477
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For Generation IV nuclear reactors, optimal sensor positioning and real-time estimation of the quantities of interest are both open problems. In particular, the harsh environment of fast reactors, both due to the high radioactive levels and the presence of non-conventional coolants such as liquid metals or molten salts, is such that if possible, in-core sensor positioning requires careful attention. This problem is exacerbated for the Molten Salt Fast Reactor, which foresees fuel and coolant homogeneously mixed in the liquid phase and whose current design does not envision in-core solid structures. Thus, the possibility of estimating relevant in-core quantities, such as the neutron flux, from measurements taken outside the reactor core (for example, by sensors located in the reflector) is worth exploring, as it has important implications for safety, monitoring, and control. In this context, the Data-Driven Reduced Order Modeling framework offers a promising tool for combining out-core sparse measurements with some mathematical background knowledge, in the form of a reduced order model, on the in-core state to efficiently and accurately reconstruct the former in the whole core domain. This work explores this possibility by employing the Generalized Empirical Interpolation Method to retrieve the in-core neutron flux starting from sparse out-core noisy measurements, including a preliminary step of optimization of the sensor positioning in the reflector surrounding the core. The reconstruction capabilities, in both interpolation and extrapolation regimes, of the algorithm are really promising, showing that with few sensors, it is possible to infer significant information about the dominant physics inside the reactor core.