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MIT professor develops method to verify compliance with Outer Space Treaty
Danagoulian
Areg Danagoulian of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is proposing a mechanism for verifying that Earth-orbiting satellites are in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the placement of nuclear weapons in space. Danagoulian’s “concept and feasibility study,” titled “Verification of the Outer Space Treaty with cosmic protons,” was published recently in the journal Nature.
Jin Li, Volkan Seker, Andrew Ward, Thomas Downar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 5 | May 2025 | Pages 772-792
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2397621
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo codes have become increasingly popular for generating homogenized few-group cross-section data, especially for advanced reactor designs that have complex geometries and nontraditional compositions. However, the stochastic nature of Monte Carlo processes has the potential to introduce additional statistical uncertainties in the overall uncertainty in the prediction of core behavior. The work performed in this research quantified the additional uncertainty introduced by the use of Monte Carlo multigroup cross sections into the analysis of graphite-moderated pebble bed reactors. In this research, the objective was achieved by performing uncertainty quantification for the key output parameters in deterministic steady-state and transient safety calculations. The results show that when the homogenized multigroup cross sections are generated with a sufficient number of neutron histories in the Monte Carlo calculation, the uncertainties in the subsequent deterministic simulations caused by the Monte Carlo cross-section uncertainty are negligible compared to the contributions from the uncertainties of other input parameters.