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Maine Maritime Academy to offer nuclear engineering technology major
The Maine Maritime Academy (MMA) is set to become the first maritime academy in the United States to offer a major in nuclear engineering technology. The college characterized it as “an important step in addressing workforce needs and advancing clean energy solutions” in a LinkedIn post announcing the major.
Liam Carlson, Jean C. Ragusa, Paolo Balestra, Yaqi Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 1 | March 2026 | Pages S574-S594
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2471722
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The pebble tracking transport (PTT) algorithm offers a high-fidelity deterministic approach for neutron transport for pebble bed reactors (PBRs). This approach requires the mesh for the active-core region to consist exclusively of tetrahedral elements, where each node in the pebble-packing region represents a pebble centroid. This paper investigates the application of PTT for full-scale PBRs, considering both the isothermal and the temperature-dependent core conditions. Macroscopic cross sections are generated using Serpent 2 full-core eigenvalue simulations where pebbles are grouped into disjoint subsets using machine learning. To minimize the need for individual cross-section sets for each pebble in the core, K-means clustering is used to group pebbles by temperature and neutronic environment parameters. We compare the multiplication factor and power rate distributions between PTT simulations using the Griffin reactor physics software and reference solutions from Serpent 2. Our analysis shows that a full-core, high-fidelity PTT calculation produces accurate results with minimal local (pebblewise) errors. Additionally, timing results indicate that PTT simulations converge rapidly on modern supercomputing platforms.