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Growth beyond megawatts
Hash Hashemianpresident@ans.org
When talking about growth in the nuclear sector, there can be a somewhat myopic focus on increasing capacity from year to year. Certainly, we all feel a degree of excitement when new projects are announced, and such announcements are undoubtedly a reflection of growth in the field, but it’s important to keep in mind that growth in nuclear has many metrics and takes many forms.
Nuclear growth—beyond megawatts—also takes the form of increasing international engagement. That engagement looks like newcomer countries building their nuclear sectors for the first time. It also looks like countries with established nuclear sectors deepening their connections and collaborations. This is one of the reasons I have been focused throughout my presidency on bringing more international members and organizations into the fold of the American Nuclear Society.
Patrick F. O’Rourke, Anil K. Prinja, Scott D. Ramsey
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 1 | April 2025 | Pages S180-S200
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2439227
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this report, we study several aspects of the root spectrum of the coupled assembly probability of initiation equations to bolster confidence in the results of the companion paper, A. K. Prinja, P. F. O’Rourke, and S. D. Ramsey, “Probability of Initiation in Coupled Multiplying Assemblies.” We apply Bernstein’s Theorem to develop analytical expressions for the number of distinct nontrivial roots for two and three coupled assemblies and make inferences that the behavior holds in general. This result provides a benchmark number for the expected number of roots to be obtained when calculating the entire root spectrum. We employ a numerical method, the Homotopy Continuation Method (HCM), to obtain the entire root spectrum. We use the HCM to study parametric behavior of the root spectrum for subcritical and supercritical systems and compare with the Newton-Raphson Method (NRM) result, which provides only a single solution but is computationally favorable. We show that indeed the NRM and HCM agree (for a single root), and we further perform a stability analysis on the entire spectrum to show that the NRM result is the only stable root in the spectrum for the entire range of system criticalities. The results are demonstrated for systems consisting of two and four coupled assemblies.