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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Deep geologic repository progress—2025 Update
Editor's note: This article has was originally published in November 2023. It has been updated with new information as of June 2025.
Outside my office, there is a display case filled with rock samples from all over the world. It contains a disk of translucent, orange salt from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; a core of white-and-bronze gneiss from the site of the future deep geologic repository in Eurajoki, Finland; several angular chunks of fine-grained, gray claystone from the underground research laboratory at Bure, France; and a piece of coarse-grained granite from the underground research tunnel in Daejeon, South Korea.
William C. Dawn, Scott Palmtag
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 12 | December 2023 | Pages 3138-3159
Regular Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2189510
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Microreactor Exascale eZ CALculation (MEZCAL) tool has been developed to accurately and efficiently solve the neutron transport equation in general, unstructured meshes to support the design and modeling of microreactors. MEZCAL solves the self-adjoint angular flux form of the neutron transport equation using the finite element method. As the neutron transport equation is computationally expensive to solve, MEZCAL is designed to efficiently use exascale computing architectures, with an emphasis on graphics processing unit computing. To leverage existing tools, MEZCAL is built using the MFEM library and uses solvers from HYPRE, PETSc, and SLEPc. Verification of the neutron transport solver in MEZCAL is demonstrated with the solution to a one-dimensional cylindrical problem that has a semi-analytic solution. After verification, a realistic microreactor based on the MARVEL microreactor design is modeled using MEZCAL. Spatial and angular refinement results are presented for a two-dimensional model of the MARVEL microreactor, and the eigenvalue is converged to approximately 60 pcm. This convergence required a very fine mesh and more than 3.76 Billion Degrees Of Freedom (BDOF). Preliminary results are also presented for a three-dimensional model of the MARVEL microreactor. Finally, a weak scaling study is performed to investigate how the methods in MEZCAL will scale for larger problems with the next generation of exascale computing architectures.