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Katy Huff on the impact of loosening radiation regulations
Katy Huff, former assistant secretary of nuclear energy at the Department of Energy, recently wrote an op-ed that was published in Scientific American.
In the piece, Huff, who is an ANS member and an associate professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign, argues that weakening Nuclear Regulatory Commission radiation regulations without new research-based evidence will fail to speed up nuclear energy development and could have negative consequences.
Jaakko Leppänen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 11 | November 2019 | Pages 1416-1432
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1603710
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A deterministic importance solver has been implemented as an internal subroutine in the Serpent 2 Monte Carlo code for the purpose of producing weight-window meshes for variance reduction. The routine solves the adjoint transport problem using the response matrix method with coupling coefficients obtained from a conventional forward Monte Carlo simulation. The methodology can be applied to photon and neutron external source problems, and the solver supports multiple energy groups and several mesh types. Importances can be generated with respect to multiple responses, and an iterative global variance reduction sequence enables distributing the transported particle population evenly throughout the geometry. This paper describes the methodology applied in the response matrix solver and presents a verification for the generated importance functions through simple demonstrations. A practical example involving a photon shielding problem is included for performance evaluation.