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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.
Pavel A. Grechanuk, Michael E. Rising, Todd S. Palmer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 12 | December 2021 | Pages 1265-1278
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1935102
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this work, we aim to show that machine learning algorithms are promising tools for the identification of nuclear data that contribute to increased errors in transport simulations. We demonstrate this through an application of a machine learning algorithm (Random Forest) to the Whisper/MCNP6 criticality validation library to identify nuclear data that are associated with an increase of the bias (simulated-experimental ) in the calculations. Specifically, the sensitivity profiles (with respect to nuclear data) of solution benchmarks are used to predict the bias, and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) are used to explain how the sensitivities are related to the predicted bias. The SHAP values can be interpreted as sensitivity coefficients of the machine learning model to the sensitivities that are used to make predictions of bias. Using the SHAP values, we can identify specific subsets of nuclear data that have the highest probability of influencing bias. We demonstrate the utility of this method by showing how SHAP values were used to identify an inconsistency in the inelastic scattering nuclear data. The methodology presented here is not limited to transport problems and can be applied to other simulations if there are experimental measurements to compare against, simulations of those experimental measurements, and the ability to calculate sensitivities of the model output with respect to the data inputs.