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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Surplus plutonium for power reactor fuel: What’s on offer
The Department of Energy has a plan for private companies to “dispose of surplus plutonium”—about 19.7 metric tons in both oxide and metal forms—by “making the materials available for advanced nuclear technologies.” A Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program request for applications (RFA) issued October 21 describes the plutonium on offer, and the “thresholds” prospective applicants must meet.
Dan Gabriel Cacuci
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 6 | June 2019 | Pages 555-600
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1553910
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents an application of the Second-Order Adjoint Sensitivity Analysis Methodology (2nd-ASAM) to the neutron transport Boltzmann equation that models a multiplying subcritical system comprising a nonfission neutron source to compute efficiently and exactly all of the first- and second-order functional derivatives (sensitivities) of a detector’s response to all of the model’s parameters, including isotopic number densities, microscopic cross sections, fission spectrum, sources, and detector response function. As indicated by the general theoretical considerations underlying the 2nd-ASAM, the number of computations required to obtain the first and second orders increases linearly in augmented Hilbert spaces as opposed to increasing exponentially in the original Hilbert space. The results presented in this work are currently being implemented in several production-oriented three-dimensional neutron transport code systems for analyzing specific subcritical systems.