Abstract
Because the superconductivity of the ITER toroidal field coils (TFC) must be protected against local overheating, detailed spatial distribution of the TFC nuclear heating is needed to assess the acceptability of the designs of the blanket, vacuum vessel (VV), and VV thermal shield. Accurate Monte Carlo calculations of the distributions of the TFC nuclear heating are challenged by the small volumes of the tally segmentations and by the thick layers of shielding provided by the blanket and VV. To speed up the MCNP calculation of the nuclear heating distribution in different segments of the coil casing, ground insulation, and winding packs of the ITER TFC, the ITER Organization (IO) used the MCNP weight window generator (WWG). The maximum relative uncertainty of the tallies in this calculation was 82.7%. In this work, this MCNP calculation was repeated using variance reduction parameters generated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory AutomateD VAriaNce reducTion Generator (ADVANTG) code and both MCNP calculations were compared in terms of computational efficiency and reliability. Even though the ADVANTG MCNP calculation used less than one-sixth of the computational resources of the IO calculation, the relative uncertainties of all the tallies in the ADVANTG MCNP calculation were less than 6.1%. The nuclear heating results of the two calculations were significantly different by factors between 1.5 and 2.3 in some of the segments of the furthest winding pack turn from the plasma neutron source. Even though the nuclear heating in this turn may not affect the ITER design because it is much smaller than the nuclear heating in the turns that are closer to the plasma source, it is our recommendation to adopt the utilization of ADVANTG in similar calculations to increase the reliability of MCNP calculations of detailed distributions of nuclear responses.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 255-260 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Fusion Engineering and Design |
Volume | 109-111 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 1 2016 |
Funding
This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
Funders | Funder number |
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DOE Public Access Plan | |
LLC | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |
UT-Battelle | |
United States Government | |
U.S. Department of Energy |
Keywords
- Hybrid Monte Carlo/deterministic techniques
- ITER shielding
- Nuclear heating distribution
- Toroidal field coils