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The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Ding She, Kan Wang, Ganglin Yu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 172 | Number 2 | October 2012 | Pages 127-137
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-44
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In loosely coupled systems and large-scale systems, Monte Carlo criticality calculation suffers from slow fission source convergence because of the high dominance ratio (DR). In previous work, the Wielandt method and the superhistory method have been separately proposed to accelerate source convergence. However, although both methods decrease the DR, they are found not able to sufficiently accelerate fission source convergence. In this paper, the effective DR is defined and used to analyze the effectiveness of the Wielandt method and the superhistory method and to theoretically prove that they cannot reduce the computational time to converge the fission source. Accordingly, both methods are modified by adjusting the source population of inactive cycles, and their efficiency after adjustment is also compared. Moreover, the asymptotic Wielandt method (AWM) and the asymptotic superhistory method (ASM) are proposed, and the rules of deciding asymptotic parameters are also discussed. The new methods are implemented into the RMC code and validated by calculating loosely coupled problems and large-scale problems. Numerical calculation results show that AWM and ASM are practical and efficient for source convergence acceleration, which can save 75% to 90% of the computational time to reach a converged fission source.