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Oak Ridge focuses neutron scattering studies on TRISO fuels
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is reporting a development in TRISO fuel research that could help evaluate high-temperature gas reactor fuels. ORNL researchers used the Spallation Neutrons and Pressure Diffractometer at the lab’s Spallation Neutron Source to make neutron scattering measurements on TRISO fuel particles containing high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).
Paul R. Miles, Jared A. Cook, Zoey V. Angers, Christopher J. Swenson, Brian C. Kiedrowski, John Mattingly, Ralph C. Smith
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 1 | January 2021 | Pages 37-53
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1738796
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recent research has focused on the development of surrogate models for radiation source localization in a simulated urban domain. We employ the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) code to provide high-fidelity simulations of radiation transport within an urban domain. The model is constructed to employ a source location () as input and return the estimated count rate for a set of specified detector locations. Because MCNP simulations are computationally expensive, we develop efficient and accurate surrogate models of the detector responses. We construct surrogate models using Gaussian processes and neural networks that we train and verify using the MCNP simulations. The trained surrogate models provide an efficient framework for Bayesian inference and experimental design. We employ Delayed Rejection Adaptive Metropolis (DRAM), a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm, to infer the location and intensity of an unknown source. The DRAM results yield a posterior probability distribution for the source’s location conditioned on the observed detector count rates. The posterior distribution exhibits regions of high and low probability within the simulated environment identifying potential source locations. In this manner, we can quantify the source location to within at least one of these regions of high probability in the considered cases. Employing these methods, we are able to reduce the space of potential source locations by at least 60%.