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Deployable Energy achieves criticality at INL
Ahead of the July 4 deadline set by President Trump in Executive Order 14301, the nuclear community has been following the developments of the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, in which companies have been pursuing DOE authorization to build and test their first-of-a-kind nuclear technologies. The EO set an ambitious goal of three reactors achieving criticality by July 4, 2026.
Connor Woodsford, James Tutt, Jim E. Morel
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 11 | November 2024 | Pages 2148-2156
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2303107
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The second-moment (SM) method is a linear variant of the quasi-diffusion (QD) method for accelerating the iterative convergence of Sn source calculations. It has several significant advantages relative to the QD method, diffusion synthetic acceleration, and nonlinear diffusion acceleration. Here, we define a variant of this method for k-eigenvalue calculations that retains the advantages of the original method, and we computationally demonstrate the efficacy of the method for simple example calculations. In particular, this method has two important properties. First, it is a linear acceleration scheme requiring only the solution of a pure k-eigenvalue diffusion equation with a corrective source term as opposed to a k-eigenvalue drift-diffusion equation. Second, unconditional stability is achieved even when the diffusion equation is not discretized in a manner consistent with the Sn spatial discretization. We are unaware of any other scheme that has these properties. We also show a connection between our method and the k-eigenvalue acceleration technique of Barbu and Adams, which motivated us to develop our SM method.