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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
E. Masiello, F. Filiciotto, S. Lapuerta-Cochet, R. Lenain
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 9 | September 2023 | Pages 2404-2424
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2175583
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents an asymptotic method based on angular flux expansion in a Neumann series. The technique is aimed at effective reduction of the memory imprint of numerical methods based on collision probabilities (CPs). The asymptotic method has been implemented in the heterogeneous Cartesian cells of the integro-differential transport solver (IDT). The IDT solves the neutral-particle transport equation by discrete ordinates combined with angular-dependent CP matrices. In lattice depletion calculations, because of the change of isotopic concentration along the burnup, methods based on CP discretization, such as current-coupling CP or the one presented in this paper, would require construction and storage of a set of CP coefficients for any depleted pin cell. When the number of media grows, the performances of the solver are bounded by the memory pressure caused by the growth of coefficients. Application of the asymptotic technique, presented in this paper, transforms by two user’s parameters the memory-bound solver in a compute-bound application, where the principal workload is transferred from coefficients to source iterations. In this work, a theoretical study of the method is presented together with two applications to two-dimensional assembly simulations. The effects on self-shielded and depleted materials are highlighted. Preliminary results show an encouraging reduction of memory occupation by a factor 10 without any significant loss of accuracy.