Novel hybrid Monte Carlo/deterministic technique for shutdown dose rate analyses of fusion energy systems

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9 Scopus citations

Abstract

The rigorous 2-step (R2S) computational system uses three-dimensional Monte Carlo transport simulations to calculate the shutdown dose rate (SDDR) in fusion reactors. Accurate full-scale R2S calculations are impractical in fusion reactors because they require calculating space- and energy-dependent neutron fluxes everywhere inside the reactor. The use of global Monte Carlo variance reduction techniques was suggested for accelerating the R2S neutron transport calculation. However, the prohibitive computational costs of these approaches, which increase with the problem size and amount of shielding materials, inhibit their ability to accurately predict the SDDR in fusion energy systems using full-scale modeling of an entire fusion plant. This paper describes a novel hybrid Monte Carlo/deterministic methodology that uses the Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) method but focuses on multi-step shielding calculations. The Multi-Step CADIS (MS-CADIS) methodology speeds up the R2S neutron Monte Carlo calculation using an importance function that represents the neutron importance to the final SDDR. Using a simplified example, preliminary results showed that the use of MS-CADIS enhanced the efficiency of the neutron Monte Carlo simulation of an SDDR calculation by a factor of 550 compared to standard global variance reduction techniques, and that the efficiency enhancement compared to analog Monte Carlo is higher than a factor of 10,000.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1933-1938
Number of pages6
JournalFusion Engineering and Design
Volume89
Issue number9-10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2014

Funding

This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy. The US Government and the publisher, by accepting for publication, acknowledges that the US Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US Government purposes.

Keywords

  • Hybrid Monte Carlo/deterministic
  • Multi-step shielding analysis
  • Shutdown dose rate

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