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Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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DOE issues new NEPA rule and procedures—and accelerates DOME reactor testing
Meeting a deadline set in President Trump’s May 23 executive order “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy,” the DOE on June 30 updated information on its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) rulemaking and implementation procedures and published on its website an interim final rule that rescinds existing regulations alongside new implementing procedures.
Ruixian Fang, Dan G. Cacuci
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 8 | August 2024 | Pages 1682-1737
Computer Code Abstract | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2255725
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents a software module called 4th-Order-SENS, which enables the efficient computation of exactly obtained expressions for all sensitivities, up to and including the 4th order, of a functional of the particle flux (e.g., the leakage of particles out of a body) with respect to nuclear parameters (total, scattering, and fission cross sections; nu, chi, sources; and number densities) for systems modeled by the neutron transport equation. The 4th-Order-SENS module implements the nth-Order Comprehensive Adjoint Sensitivity Analysis Methodology for Linear Systems (nth-CASAM-L), which is the only practically implementable methodology for obtaining the exact expressions of arbitrarily high-order sensitivities of model responses to model parameters, for response-coupled forward/adjoint large-scale linear systems. In addition to presenting the equations that are solved to obtain the 1st-order through 4th-order sensitivities, this work also describes the components of the module 4th-Order-SENS, including the user interface, input file, output files, and several independent code verification capabilities using symmetries and/or finite-difference formulas. The 4th-Order-SENS module is written in Python and Fortran and runs on Linux platforms. Several illustrative applications involving fixed-source problems in one-dimensional spherical and slab geometries are also presented.