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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Risk-informed, performance-based design in INL’s MARVEL reactor
The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) has held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series. Former RP3C chair N. Prasad Kadambi opened the meeting with brief introductory remarks about the RP3C and the need for new approaches to nuclear design that go beyond conventional and deterministic methods. He then welcomed this month’s speaker: Doug Gerstner, a nuclear safety engineer at Idaho National Laboratory, who presented “Application of a Qualitative RIPB Approach for the MARVEL Microreactor at INL.”
Watch the full webinar here.
M. M. R. Williams, Edward W. Larsen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 139 | Number 1 | September 2001 | Pages 66-77
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2222
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The majority of earlier work on neutron transport in spatially random media has relied on special models of the random process, closure techniques or perturbation theory. The purpose of the present paper is to further develop a technique, which employs the source-sink method and simulation, and which in principle leads to exact probability distributions, to assess the accuracy of such approximate methods. To this end, we also use perturbation theory, and extend it to eigenvalue problems thereby enabling random fluctuations in reactivity to be studied and some measures of their statistical properties to be calculated. We have found, by comparing results for the variance in the reactivity fluctuations with essentially exact values, that the perturbation method is an accurate way to deal with stochastic equations and is far more efficient numerically than the more exact simulation method.