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Breaking ground on a new approach to construction
The drive to Kairos Power’s reactor demonstration site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is not only scenic—it’s historic. Nearly 85 years ago, roughly 30,000 construction workers transformed orchards and farmland into a key Manhattan Project site. Depending on your route, you may pass by one of the three gatehouses that were once military checkpoints controlling access to Atomic Energy Commission production facilities.
Thomas E. Booth
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 138 | Number 1 | May 2001 | Pages 96-103
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2204
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It is well known that zero-variance Monte Carlo solutions are possible if an exact importance function is available to bias the random walks. Geometric convergence with iteration has been demonstrated when the importance function estimated on the n'th iteration is used to bias the random walks on the n + 1st iteration, i.e., adaptive importance sampling. Note that geometric convergence with iteration may be less efficient than a nonadaptive Monte Carlo calculation if the time per iteration grows too fast. This paper shows a general method for sampling the zero-variance kernels enabling a Monte Carlo solution that converges inversely with the computer time.