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Deployable Energy achieves criticality at INL
Ahead of the July 4 deadline set by President Trump in Executive Order 14301, the nuclear community has been following the developments of the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, in which companies have been pursuing DOE authorization to build and test their first-of-a-kind nuclear technologies. The EO set an ambitious goal of three reactors achieving criticality by July 4, 2026.
Guillaume Giudicelli, Kord Smith, Benoit Forget
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 11 | November 2020 | Pages 1044-1055
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1765606
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A recent hybrid stochastic-deterministic calculation scheme using Monte Carlo–tallied group cross sections in a deterministic solver uses the best of both worlds for accurate and fast reactor agnostic transport simulations. However, neglecting the angular dependence of group cross sections induces large self-shielding errors in resonance groups, causing a large reactivity bias up to 300 pcm in light water reactors. To recover this error, we introduce a two-scale assembly transport calculation scheme: cross sections are tallied at the assembly level, while equivalence parameters are computed in a two-dimensional (2-D) pin cell system. We validate a novel equivalence method based on jump conditions on angular fluxes by comparing to the well-established superhomogenization method for 2-D and three-dimensional (3-D) linear source method of characteristics calculations. Test cases include 2-D and 3-D assemblies of two different enrichments with homogeneous and discretized cross-section discretizations. The linear source approximation enables using coarse source-region discretization for these hot zero-power problems. Both equivalence techniques perform similarly, recover the reactivity bias, and achieve near preservation of reaction rates, supporting this multiscale approach to equivalence.