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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.
P. K. Sarkar, Herbert Rief
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 124 | Number 2 | October 1996 | Pages 291-308
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE96-A28579
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The amounts of change in the variance and in the efficiency of nonanalog Monte Carlo simulations for certain variations in the biasing parameters are important quantities when optimizing such simulations. Anew approach, based on the differential operator sampling technique, is outlined to estimate the derivatives of variance and efficiency with respect to the biasing parameters; the same simulation constructed to solve the primary problem is used. An algorithm requiring the first- and higher order derivatives of the natural logarithm of the second moment to predict minimum-variance-biasing parameters is presented. Equations pertaining to the algorithm are derived and solved numerically for an exponentially transformed one-group slab transmission problem for various slab thicknesses and scattering probabilities. The results indicate that optimization of nonanalog simulations can be achieved so that the present method will be useful in self-learning Monte Carlo schemes.