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Can hydrogen be the transportation fuel in an otherwise nuclear economy?
Let’s face it: The global economy should be powered primarily by nuclear power. And it probably will by the end of this century, with a still-significant assist from renewables and hydro. Once nuclear systems are dominant, the costs come down to where gas is now; and when carbon emissions are reduced to a small portion of their present state, it will become obvious that most other sources are only good in niche settings. I mean, why use small modular reactors to load-follow when they can just produce that power instead of buffering it?
Dan G. Cacuci, Jeffrey A. Favorite
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 190 | Number 2 | May 2018 | Pages 105-133
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1426899
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents an application of Cacuci’s Second-Order Adjoint Sensitivity Analysis Methodology (2nd-ASAM) to the simplified Boltzmann equation that models the transport of uncollided particles through a medium to compute efficiently and exactly all of the first- and second-order derivatives (sensitivities) of a detector’s response with respect to the system’s isotopic number densities, microscopic cross sections, source emission rates, and detector response function. The off-the-shelf PARTISN multigroup discrete ordinates code is employed to solve the equations underlying the 2nd-ASAM. The accuracy of the results produced using PARTISN is verified by using the results of three test configurations: (1) a homogeneous sphere, for which the response is the exactly known total uncollided leakage, (2) a multiregion two-dimensional (r-z) cylinder, and (3) a two-region sphere for which the response is a reaction rate. For the homogeneous sphere, results for the total leakage as well as for the respective first- and second-order sensitivities are in excellent agreement with the exact benchmark values. For the nonanalytic problems, the results obtained by applying the 2nd-ASAM to compute sensitivities are in excellent agreement with central-difference estimates. The efficiency of the 2nd-ASAM is underscored by the fact that, for the cylinder, only 12 adjoint PARTISN computations were required by the 2nd-ASAM to compute all of the benchmark’s 18 first-order sensitivities and 224 second-order sensitivities, in contrast to the 877 PARTISN calculations needed to compute the respective sensitivities using central finite differences, and this number does not include the additional calculations that were required to find appropriate values of the perturbations to use for the central differences.