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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Rong Kong, Jerome Spanier
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 168 | Number 3 | July 2011 | Pages 197-225
Technical Paper | Geometric Convergence of Adaptive Monte Carlo Algorithms for Radiative Transport Problems Based on Importance Sampling Methods | doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-29
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Importance sampling is a very well-known variance-reducing technique used in Monte Carlo simulations of radiative transport. It involves a distortion of the physical (analog) transition probabilities with the goal of causing events of interest in the computation to occur more frequently than in the analog process. This distortion is then compensated by a corresponding alteration of the estimating random variable in order to remove any bias from the estimates of quantities of interest. In this paper, we construct several families of estimators based on importance sampling methods to solve general transport problems and prove that the adaptive application of each estimator produces geometric convergence of the approximate solution. We also present numerical results that illustrate important elements of the theory.