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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.
Yannick Peneliau, Jonathan Dufour
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 1 | April 2025 | Pages S355-S367
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2342496
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Dose rate assessment is of utmost importance in fusion reactors because of the maintenance operations that these facilities will require. The standard way to perform this assessment in ITER is use of the Direct 1-Step (D1S) methodology, which consists of performing neutron transport simulation, material activation, and decay photon transport simulation in one step and thus in one simulation only. Usually, implementation of the D1S methodology requires changing the source files in a reference Monte Carlo code. The purpose of the present work is to develop an easy-to-implement method for Monte Carlo codes to help calculate the dose rate in fusion reactors. To do so, the proposal is to act on nuclear data only and not on source files of the simulation codes. This is done by replacing prompt photon production in evaluation files by suitable decay photon production, taking into account radioactive decays of radionuclides and irradiation history. This study was to be applied first on the TRIPOLI-4® Monte Carlo code for the sake of simplicity. TRIPOLI-4 is the reference code for particle transport at CEA. The verification and validation process relies first on a comparison to the reference Rigorous 2-Step (R2S) methodology and then on an experiment, the so-called Frascati Neutron Generator (FNG) dose experiment. The nuclear database to be changed is of the ENDF-6 format, a recurrent format in neutronics studies. The analysis studied both neutron and photon responses to check if the simulation was performing normally in a physical way and to compare the results with references provided by simulations based on the R2S methodology or by the FNG dose experiment. The simulations have proven to be in good agreement with the experimental results.