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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.
Philippe Humbert
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 4 | April 2026 | Pages 847-864
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2480520
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For a number of applications like low-source reactor start-up or neutron coincidence counting, it is necessary to take into account the stochastic nature of neutron transport and go beyond the average neutron density, which is the solution to the linear Boltzmann equation. In this work, we are particularly interested in calculating the moments and probabilities of the number of neutrons detected during a time window. It is known that in the case of a single initial neutron, these quantities are the solution of a system of coupled adjoint transport equations and that a neutron source can be taken into account a second time using summations with the source strength. The purpose of the current work is first to present the derivation of these equations in a form where they can be solved up to an arbitrary order and where the fission terms are expanded according to the moments of the fission multiplicity. For simplicity, the derivation is first presented in a lumped, also called point, model approximation before considering the full phase-space case. Thereafter, we describe the implementation of the solution algorithm in the deterministic, discrete ordinates code PANDA. Finally, we present some numerical results and intercode comparisons for verification purposes and to illustrate the applicability of the method.