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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Matt Wald on nuclear power
Wald
Matt Wald, an independent energy analyst and a writer who contributes to the Breakthrough Institute and has written feature articles for Nuclear News, recently shared his nuclear perspectives in a Zoom talk with Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering ORNL’s scientific goals.
Missed opportunity: Wald, a former reporter for The New York Times and a former policy analyst for the Nuclear Energy Institute, feels that the nuclear industry and community “have committed industrial sin. Nuclear suffered through a long drought, and now it sees terrific demand for its product, and it’s not ready to deliver the needed electricity.”
R. P. Gardner, M. Mickael, M. Oraby, K. Verghese
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 108 | Number 3 | July 1991 | Pages 240-246
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE91-A23822
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A general direction biasing approach for Monte Carlo scattering simulation in a laboratory system, previously applied to neutron scattering for all elements except hydrogen for isotropic center-of-mass scattering, is applied to hydrogen. (Neutron scattering with hydrogen represents a unique problem in direction biasing, in that only scattering at angles <π/2 are allowable.) The pertinent relationships are derived and sample results are given for problems of practical importance in neutron porosity well logging. (Note that this problem is significantly different from neutron shielding problems in that detection is favored for thermal neutrons in this case, while escape occurs at all energies in the shielding problem.) The use of neutron hydrogen scattering direction biasing gives the same results in the problems treated as when it is not used, indicating that the treatment is valid. However, for the approach of fixing the direction biasing parameters throughout a neutron history, the addition of hydrogen direction biasing only slightly improves the Monte Carlo figure of merit, and then only when very moderate biasing is used. It is likely that the optimum use of neutron hydrogen scattering direction biasing (at least for the neutron porosity well logging problem) will involve a more complex approach, such as tailoring the severity of the biasing to the remainder of the average neutron path length available, or, in general, to the established importance sampling technique relating to where the neutron resides in phase-space.