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Godzilla is helping ITER prepare for tokamak assembly
ITER employees stand by Godzilla, the most powerful commercially available industrial robot available. (Photo: ITER)
Many people are familiar with Godzilla as a giant reptilian monster that emerged from the sea off the coast of Japan, the product of radioactive contamination. These days, there is a new Godzilla, but it has a positive—and entirely fact-based—association with nuclear energy. This one has emerged inside the Tokamak Assembly Preparation Building of ITER in southern France.
P. E. Labeau
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 126 | Number 2 | June 1997 | Pages 131-145
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A24467
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Probabilistic dynamics offers a general Markovian framework for a dynamic treatment of reliability. Monte Carlo simulation appears to be a powerful and flexible tool to deal with the high dimensionality of realistic applications. Yet an analog game turns out to be ineffective for two main reasons: Very rare events leading to failures are not sampled enough to obtain a good statistical accuracy, and the equations of the dynamics have to be integrated all along each history, which results in very large computation times. Recent improvements in Monte Carlo simulation applied to probabilistic dynamics allow a much faster and more precise estimation of the unreliability of large systems, and they are illustrated on a pressurized water reactor pressurizer.