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Fusion Science and Technology
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In transition: Commercializing fusion power
Commercial fusion power is closer than ever. There are now around 30 U.S. fusion companies, several of which claim to be on track to connect to the grid as early as the 2030s.
Tokamak and laser inertial confinement approaches benefit from decades of research at facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and ITER, with alternative concepts including stellarator, magnetic mirror, and Z-pinch confinement also making notable progress as private and government funding for fusion increases.
R. N. Blomquist, E. M. Gelbard
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 141 | Number 2 | June 2002 | Pages 85-100
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-30
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We compare nominal efficiencies, i.e., variances in power shapes for equal running time, of different versions of the Monte Carlo (MC) eigenvalue computation. The two main methods considered here are "conventional" MC and the superhistory method. Within each of these major methods, different variants are available for the main steps of the basic MC algorithm. Thus, for example, different treatments of the fission process may vary in the extent to which they follow, in analog fashion, the details of real-world fission, or they may vary in details of the methods by which they choose next-generation source sites. In general the same options are available in both the superhistory method and conventional MC, but there seems not to have been much examination of the special properties of the two major methods and their minor variants. We find, first, that the superhistory method is just as efficient as conventional MC and, second, that use of different variants of the basic algorithms may, in special cases, have a surprisingly large effect on MC computational efficiency.