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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.
Qicang Shen, Brendan Kochunas
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 7 | July 2023 | Pages 1364-1385
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2159276
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Solving initial value problems with high-order methods receives considerable attention in many fields because these methods can potentially improve the accuracy of the simulation results with lower computational cost than low-order methods. Most methods, however, are either complicated to implement or unstable when the order of accuracy is high. The spectral deferred correction (SDC) method is a stable, robust, and efficient high-order time-integration scheme capable of an arbitrary order of accuracy. In this paper, we apply the SDC method to solve the initial value problem of the point kinetics equations (PKEs). For our implementation, we show that SDC is -stable for orders up to eight and the order of accuracy is verified for PKE problems with a range of different reactivities. A fifth-order SDC method was then implemented to solve the exact PKE in the transient multilevel method of MPACT. The error from solutions of the exact PKE with SDC is shown to be negligible. The investigations made here can provide the foundation for future investigations simulating the neutron transport problem using the high-order methods for both spatial discretization and time integration.