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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.
Douglas E. Peplow, Thomas M. Miller, Bruce W. Patton, John C. Wagner
Nuclear Technology | Volume 182 | Number 1 | April 2013 | Pages 63-74
Technical Paper | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15827
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The potential for smuggling special nuclear material (SNM) into the United States is a major concern to homeland security, so federal agencies are investigating a variety of preventive measures, including detection and interdiction of SNM during transport. One approach for SNM detection, called active interrogation, uses a radiation source, such as a beam of neutrons or photons, to scan cargo containers and detect the products of induced fissions. In realistic cargo transport scenarios, the process of inducing and detecting fissions in SNM is difficult due to the presence of various and potentially thick materials between the radiation source and the SNM and the practical limitations on radiation source strength and detection capabilities. Therefore, computer simulations are being used, along with experimental measurements, in efforts to design effective active interrogation detection systems. The computer simulations primarily consist of simulating radiation transport from the source to the detector region(s). Although the Monte Carlo method is predominantly used for these simulations, difficulties persist related to calculating statistically meaningful detector responses in practical computing times, thereby limiting their usefulness for design and evaluation of practical active interrogation systems. In previous work, the benefits of hybrid methods that use the results of approximate deterministic transport calculations to accelerate high-fidelity Monte Carlo simulations have been demonstrated for source-detector-type problems. In this work, hybrid methods are applied and evaluated for three example active interrogation problems. Additionally, a new approach is presented that uses multiple goal-based importance functions depending on a particle's relevance to the ultimate goal of the simulation. Results from the examples demonstrate that the application of hybrid methods to active interrogation simulations dramatically increases their calculational efficiency.