pyne/pyne — pull request #281 by elliottbiondo (2014-01-30 21:28:04+00:00)
Title: ALARA number densities to Materials on Mesh

Closes #280.

I decided to forgo the write/read .h5 step. For the sake of documentation I will justify my decision below:

1. The use case that instigated this feature (iterative burn up) is hindered by additional writes to disk.
2. The main argument for writing to .h5 first for the photon source file (#251) is that the information at any of the decay times is more or less of equal importance (many use cases require doing transport at many decay times). This argument does not hold true for number densities. The number density at shutdown is useful for burnup. The number density at any other random decay time is less useful; you would probably be more interested in a derived quantity like nuclear heating (see 3).
3. I am hesitant to spend time implementing more complete ALARA functionality (e.g. nuclear heating) due to the possibility of major improvements to ```Transmute```. If we ever decide we want end-all and be-all ALARA functionality, I have a pretty good idea how it should look now that I have written the code in this PR.