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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.
Thayz Gomes Ferreira, Alexis Jinaphanh, Davide Mancusi, Andrea Zoia
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 4 | April 2026 | Pages 943-975
Regular Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2496859
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, we examine the behavior of zero-variance Monte Carlo games for radiation shielding problems in the presence of neutron multiplication, whose prominent application is the analysis of in-core and ex-core detector responses during reactor start-up. Prompted by previous investigations, which had shown that the conflict between the importance of the fissile regions and the importance of the detector might lead to numerical instabilities in Consistent Adjoint-Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) strategies, we set out to explore these techniques within a simple benchmark configuration where exact zero-variance sampling can be implemented. The configurations examined here do not display any of the instabilities observed for CADIS-like schemes including neutron multiplication, which might be due to the use of branchless sampling for the collision events. Furthermore, our findings establish a clear framework that can be more broadly applied for the analysis of the robustness of ideal CADIS schemes.