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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.
Muhammad Rizwan Ali, Murat Serdar Aygul, Deokjung Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 1 | March 2026 | Pages S754-S769
Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2502714
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This article presents the novel algorithmic developments and performance analysis of the GPU-optimized REActor Physics Monte Carlo (GREAPMC) graphical processing unit (GPU)–accelerated multigroup Monte Carlo (MC) code tailored specifically for pressurized water reactor simulations. GREAPMC tackles the thread divergence issue inherent in history-based neutron tracking on GPUs by introducing two new optimization strategies. The first novel approach dynamically replaces inactive particles with new ones during the execution of the transport loop, while the second strategy enhances efficiency by capping the history length during active cycles at a predefined maximum number of interactions. Subsequently, it sorts and invokes the kernel with only the surviving neutrons. The maximum number of interactions is automatically adjusted while considering cycle time during inactive cycles. Both methods significantly accelerate computation compared to MCS, a high-fidelity MC code developed at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, with the latter approach demonstrating the most substantial acceleration. GREAPMC further enhances efficiency by adopting cell-based geometry modeling. This approach eliminates cell search overhead, ensuring consistent execution times even as the number of cells increases. Overall, these algorithmic developments in GREAPMC achieve substantial computational acceleration against MCS. A single GPU card in this study demonstrates performance equivalent to approximately 570 cores from the specific CPU model used.