Novel Hybrid Monte Carlo/Deterministic Technique for Shutdown Dose Rate Analyses of Fusion Energy Systems

Conference · Tue Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 2013

OSTI ID:1096313

Ibrahim, Ahmad M ^[1]; Peplow, Douglas E. ^[1]; Peterson, Joshua L ^[1]; Grove, Robert E ^[1]

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1. ORNL

The rigorous 2-step (R2S) method 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 neutron transport calculation of the R2S method. The prohibitive computational costs of these approaches, which increase with the problem size and amount of shielding materials, inhibit their use in the accurate full-scale neutronics analyses of fusion reactors. This paper describes a novel hybrid Monte Carlo/deterministic technique that uses the Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) methodology but focuses on multi-step shielding calculations. The Multi-Step CADIS (MS-CADIS) method speeds up the Monte Carlo neutron calculation of the R2S method using an importance function that represents the importance of the neutrons to the final SDDR. Using a simplified example, preliminarily 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 increase over analog Monte Carlo is higher than 10,000.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); ITER Program
• Sponsoring Organization: ORNL Program Development
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 1096313
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

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