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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.
Isao Murata, Detlef Filges, Frank Goldenbaum
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 159 | Number 3 | July 2008 | Pages 273-283
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE159-273
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new importance estimation method, which is based on the adjoint function definition, has been proposed especially for the weight window (WW) technique of MCNP, which is well known as one of the most powerful variance-reduction techniques in Monte Carlo codes. The method employs the scattering point base importance estimation, unlike the WW generator (WWG) of MCNP for the point detector function. Every scattering point has an adjoint contribution to the detector, with which a space-, energy-, and angle-dependent importance for WW could be estimated. From the numerical test calculations, the basic performance was confirmed to be better than WWG by comparing figure-of-merit values. It would be expected that the performance of WWG would be well improved by using the present method instead of the current MCNP routine of accumulating the detector contribution for the F5 tally. The presently proposed method would be a strong tool to estimate the importance applicable to various variance-reduction techniques in Monte Carlo codes.