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UIUC submits MMR construction permit application
The University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign, in partnership with Nano Nuclear Energy, has submitted a construction permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for construction of a Kronos micro modular reactor (MMR). This is the first major step in the two-part 10 CFR Part 50 licensing process for the research and test reactor and is the culmination of years of technical refinement and regulatory alignment.
The team chose to engage with the NRC in a preapplication readiness assessment, providing the agency with draft versions of the majority of the CPA’s technical content for feedback, which is expected to ensure a high-quality application.
Quincy A. Huhn, Mauricio E. Tano, Jean C. Ragusa
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 9 | September 2023 | Pages 2484-2497
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2184194
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Typical machine learning (ML) methods are difficult to apply to radiation transport due to the large computational cost associated with simulating problems to create training data. Physics-informed Neural Networks (PiNNs) are a ML method that train a neural network with the residual of a governing equation as the loss function. This allows PiNNs to be trained in a low-data regime in the absence of (experimental or synthetic) data. PiNNs also are trained on points sampled within the phase-space volume of the problem, which means they are not required to be evaluated on a mesh, providing a distinct advantage in solving the linear Boltzmann transport equation, which is difficult to discretize. We have applied PiNNs to solve the streaming and interaction terms of the linear Boltzmann transport equation to create an accurate ML model that is wrapped inside a traditional source iteration process. We present an application of Fourier Features to PiNNs that yields good performance on heterogeneous problems. We also introduce a sampling method based on heuristics that improves the performance of PiNN simulations. The results are presented in a suite of one-dimensional radiation transport problems where PiNNs show very good agreement when compared to fine-mesh answers from traditional discretization techniques.