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Task force charts growing interest in civilian maritime nuclear applications
Readers of Nuclear News will have heard of historical applications of civilian maritime nuclear power, like the merchant ship NS Savannah and the USS Sturgis floating power plant. With a few exceptions there has been little action in this area for over 50 years, and there are plenty of reasons and opinions as to why, but over the last few years the dramatic increase in interest from the maritime industry and its stakeholders has been undeniable.
Kaushik Banerjee, William R. Martin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 174 | Number 1 | May 2013 | Pages 30-45
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-94
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo point detector and surface crossing flux tallies are two widely used tallies, but they suffer from an unbounded variance. As a result, the central limit theorem cannot be used for these tallies to estimate confidence intervals. By construction, kernel density estimator (KDE) tallies can be directly used to estimate flux at a point, but the variance of this point estimate does not converge as 1/N, which is not unexpected for a point quantity. However, an improved approach is to modify both point detector and surface crossing flux tallies directly by using KDE within a variance reduction approach and taking advantage of the fact that KDE estimates the underlying probability density function. This methodology is illustrated by several numerical examples and shows numerically that both the surface crossing tally and the point detector tally converge as 1/N (in variance), and both are asymptotically unbiased.