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Excelsior University student section awarded community education grant
The American Nuclear Society Student Section at Excelsior University in Albany, N.Y., was awarded a $5,000 grant from the ANS Student Section Strategic Fund initiative for its program, Empowering Tomorrow’s Nuclear Innovators: A Collaborative Approach to Nuclear Technology Education and Awareness.
Olin W. Calvin, Micah D. Gale, Sebastian Schunert
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 2234-2250
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2161802
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Traditionally, analysts solve the Bateman depletion equations to calculate the nuclide number density (NND) of each nuclide since these densities impact other reactor parameters, such as reactivity, as they change. Many quantities of interest, such as radiation damage, are calculated using simple integration methods, assuming that the NNDs are constant over a given depletion interval. However, the NNDs are time dependent, which can be accurately represented only by the Bateman depletion equations. We propose that these quantities can be calculated simultaneously with the NNDs within the Bateman depletion equations, preserving the coupled nature of these quantities to the time-dependent NNDs. We implemented this functionality in Griffin, demonstrating that only minor code modifications were necessary in order to accommodate an evaluation of these quantities in the Bateman depletion equations. The Chebyshev Rational Approximation Method was used to successfully solve for these additional quantities in the Bateman depletion equations. For radiation damage, the results calculated by Griffin were very accurate, differing by less than 2.5% from an analytical benchmark. For other quantities, the discrepancy between quantities calculated by the Bateman depletion equations versus those calculated by the Forward Euler method exceeded 10% for decay energy and 2% for fissions per initial heavy metal atom and kinetic energy released per unit mass when few depletion intervals were used. As the number of depletion intervals increased, both methods began to converge as expected.