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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.
Matteo Stanzani, Donato M. Castelluccio, Francesco Lodi, Vincenzo G. Peluso, Giacomo Grasso, Marco Sumini
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 1 | March 2026 | Pages S342-S365
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2455341
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Depletion calculations and related sensitivity analyses are fundamental in designing nuclear reactors. Looking at the core design of liquid metal–cooled fast reactors, a novel procedure based on the Generalized Perturbation Theory was developed and implemented in the deterministic ERANOS suite to extend its current capabilities related to depletion-related sensitivity analysis. Specifically, a partial perturbative coupling of the burnup equations was introduced to estimate the sensitivities of final isotopic concentrations to microscopic cross sections. First, the procedure was successfully verified through a simple test case by comparing its results with an analytical solution obtained via MATLAB©. Then, a more complex case was studied to highlight the differences between the new perturbatively coupled configuration and the default decoupled one. Overall, the coupling proved to have a nonnegligible impact on the sensitivity coefficients, opening the path for further extending the procedure and applying it to more realistic problems.