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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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World Bank, IAEA partner to fund nuclear energy
The World Bank and the International Atomic Energy Agency signed an agreement last week to cooperate on the construction and financing of advanced nuclear projects in developing countries, marking the first partnership since the bank ended its ban on funding for nuclear energy projects.
Richard T. Evans, John K. Mattingly, Dan G. Cacuci
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 176 | Number 3 | March 2014 | Pages 325-338
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-24
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents the application of first-order adjoint sensitivity analysis, uncertainty quantification, and data assimilation to a subcritical plutonium benchmark experiment using a modified version of the discrete ordinates radiation transport code Denovo. Previous Monte Carlo simulations of this benchmark saw a consistent overprediction of the mean and variance of the measured neutron multiplicity distribution. It was observed that a small scalar reduction in the value of the 239Pu-induced fission neutron multiplicity was capable of significantly reducing the discrepancies. This work extends those results by computing first-order sensitivities to each nuclide, reaction type, energy, and material region in the benchmark. The sensitivities are then used in a data assimilation methodology to simultaneously calibrate all responses and multigroup nuclear data. The resulting best-estimate values for the energy group differential multiplicity (νEg) are 1σ to 2σ less than the nominal values found in ENDF/B-VII for energies less than ~1.5 MeV.