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Undeclared uranium hitches a ride on cobalt exports from Congo, study says
Philippe (left) and Manzuk quantified the amount of uranium that has been exported from the DRC in cobalt shipments or left behind in the environment. (Photo: Joel Hallberg/UW–Madison)
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Princeton University have published a study in Nature Communications that calls attention to a blind spot in nuclear nonproliferation: The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has exported thousands of metric tons of uranium, and there is no accounting for where it has gone.
In partnership with Lighthouse Reports and the Financial Times, UW–Madison nuclear engineering professor and nuclear security expert Sébastien Philippe and Ryan Manzuk, a geologist and research fellow in Philippe’s group and at Princeton, conducted the study using countrywide mineralization and geochemical data.
Elanchezhian Somasundaram, Todd S. Palmer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 193 | Number 3 | March 2016 | Pages 391-403
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-43
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Local Importance Function Transform (LIFT) method is a sophisticated automated variance-reduction technique for Monte Carlo simulation of radiation transport problems. In previous publications, the LIFT method was tested on geometrically simple problems with a coarse representation of radiation energy dependence, and the performance of the method was found to be promising when compared to traditional weight windows–based variance-reduction techniques. In this work, the LIFT method is tested on a spatially complex benchmark test problem with a more realistic representation of energy dependence (50 energy groups) and heterogeneous materials. The performance of the method in comparison with a CADIS (Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling)–based weight windows method and an analog Monte Carlo simulation is studied. A multigroup Monte Carlo code that utilizes portions of the framework of the deterministic tool Attila has been developed such that the overhead time in implementing the variance-reduction techniques is minimal. The Monte Carlo simulations are performed on an arbitrary tetrahedral mesh created by the mesh generator in Attila. A method to transfer the deterministic solution generated on a finer mesh to a coarser mesh for implementing the hybrid simulations has been developed, and the results are quantified.