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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Researchers use one-of-a-kind expertise and capabilities to test fuels of tomorrow
At the Idaho National Laboratory Hot Fuel Examination Facility, containment box operator Jake Maupin moves a manipulator arm into position around a pencil-thin nuclear fuel rod. He is preparing for a procedure that he and his colleagues have practiced repeatedly in anticipation of this moment in the hot cell.
Thomas E. Booth
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 122 | Number 1 | January 1996 | Pages 79-92
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE96-A28549
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The interpretation of the statistical error estimates produced by Monte Carlo transport codes is still somewhat of an art. Empirically, there are variance reduction techniques whose error estimates are almost always reliable, and there are variance reduction techniques whose error estimates are often unreliable. Unreliable error estimates usually result from inadequate large-score sampling from the score distributions’tail.Statisticians believe that more accurate confidence interval statements are possible if the general nature of the score distribution can be characterized. Here, the analytic score distribution for the exponential transform applied to a simple, spatially continuous Monte Carlo transport problem is provided. Anisotropic scattering and implicit capture are included in the theory. In large part, the analytic score distributions that are derived provide the basis for the ten new statistical quality checks in MCNP.