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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.
Meysam Ghaderi Mazaher, Ali Akbar Salehi, Naser Vosoughi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 4 | April 2022 | Pages 395-408
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1989932
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, a simpler approach compared to the existing approaches is developed to analyze nuclear reactor dynamics based on the explicit Monte Carlo method. A new population control method is also introduced to prevent neutron population growth and consequent computer memory shortages, which also increases simulation speed. The scheme is applied for time-dependent particle tracking in three-dimensional arbitrary geometries in the presence of feedbacks through a code named MCSP-Explicit. Changes in material density, as well as geometry dimensions, are also considered during simulation. MCSP-Explicit can be run with either continuous or multigroup data libraries, and it is further boosted by parallel processing to speed up simulations. A number of benchmark problems are studied at the end to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach in various situations.