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WIPP: Lessons in transportation safety
As part of a future consent-based approach by the federal government to site new deep geologic repositories for nuclear waste, local communities and states that are considering hosting such facilities are sure to have many questions. Currently, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is the only example of such a repository in operation, and it offers the opportunity for state and local officials to visit and judge for themselves the risks and benefits of hosting a similar facility. But its history can also provide lessons for these officials, particularly the political process leading up to the opening of WIPP, the safety of WIPP operations and transportation of waste from generator facilities to the site, and the economic impacts the project has had on the local area of Carlsbad, as well as the rest of the state of New Mexico.
Qingquan Pan, Tengfei Zhang, Xiaojing Liu, Yun Cai, Lianjie Wang, Kan Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 2 | February 2022 | Pages 183-192
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1968223
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a high dominance ratio system, the problem of slow fission source convergence is faced during the Monte Carlo criticality calculation. The Wielandt method and the Superhistory method have been proven to reduce the dominance ratio. Still, the Wielandt method and the Superhistory method have also proven to be unable to accelerate the convergence of the fission source. With the estimation of errors in the cumulative fission source and the batch size optimization methodology, the optimal batch size growth for the Wielandt method and the Superhistory method is proposed. Compared with the direct simulation with the optimal batch size growth, the Wielandt simulation and the Superhistory simulation better use the optimal batch size growth. A single fuel rod model was tested, and the results show that the new method is helpful for the acceleration of fission source convergence.