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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.
Liliane Basso Barichello, Rudnei Dias da Cunha, Maiara Mentges
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 4 | April 2026 | Pages 821-846
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2602120
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The mathematical complexities of solving the Boltzmann equation, even in the linear case, are well known. One of the most difficult challenges lies in treating the collision integral operator; in some applications, such as optical tomography modeling, the effects of scattering in biological tissues are a relevant factor to be considered. Recently, the Analytical Discrete Ordinates (ADO) formulation, combined with nodal techniques in two-dimensional geometries, was applied to the solution of problems in media with an arbitrary order of anisotropy. The formulation still provides explicit solutions in terms of the spatial variables for the average quantities generated by the nodal scheme (average angular flux or average radiation intensity).
In this work, the ADO-Nodal method, as the two-dimensional formulation is commonly called, is extended to the solution of two-dimensional problems using the exact representation of the scattering law (referred to as the phase function in radiation transfer applications). We provide data comparing the use of the exact representation of the scattering law and the traditional Legendre polynomial expansions, and the analysis demonstrates computational gains with the exact representation. Numerical results are also presented for a problem with parameters used in optical tomography, indicating the need for representation in higher-order discrete ordinates. In addition, a diamond difference scheme was implemented to solve a test problem to compare with the proposed formulation. Furthermore, the eigenvalue problem, which is key to the ADO method, is derived in a general form, allowing for applications in other fields of particle transport.