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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Dimitar Altiparmakov, Robert Wiersma
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 182 | Number 4 | April 2016 | Pages 395-416
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-28
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The size and the density of the collision probability matrix have been recognized as major deficiencies since the early era of development of the collision probability method. The computing time of the matrix inversion is proportional to the third degree of the number of unknowns per group and increases rapidly with the increase of the problem size. This is a severe limitation that restricts the capabilities of the method and makes it inapplicable to large-size neutron transport problems. This paper presents a new solution method that overcomes these deficiencies and extends the capabilities of the collision probability approximation. To reduce the matrix inversion time, a block partition is applied, and the solution is obtained by block iteration. Owing to the partition, the method is suitable for parallel calculations on contemporary computers. To illustrate the potential advantages, the following three groups of calculations are presented. In the first group, results of sequential calculations reveal the advantage over traditional methods of direct solution and point iteration. In the second group, memory shared parallelism results present the speedup that can be achieved in solving medium-size problems on a standard multicore desktop computer. In the third group, distributed memory calculations show an example of the solution of a large-size two-dimensional model problem of a heavy water power reactor invoking 100 thousand unknowns per group.