Seth R. Johnson

ADVANTG An Automated Variance Reduction Parameter Generator

The primary objective of ADVANTG is to reduce both the user effort and the computational time required to obtain accurate and precise tally estimates across a broad range of challenging transport applications. ADVANTG has been applied to simulations of real-world radiation shielding, detection, and neutron activation problems. Examples of shielding applications include material damage and dose rate analyses of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Spallation Neutron Source and High Flux Isotope Reactor (Risner and Blakeman 2013) and the ITER Tokamak (Ibrahim et al. 2011). ADVANTG has been applied to a suite of radiation detection, safeguards, and special nuclear material movement detection test problems (Shaver et al. 2011). ADVANTG has also been used in the prediction of activation rates within light water reactor facilities (Pantelias and Mosher 2013). In these projects, ADVANTG was demonstrated to significantly increase the tally figure of merit (FOM) relative to an analog MCNP simulation. The ADVANTG-generated parameters were also shown to be more effective than manually generated geometry splitting parameters.

Hot zero power reactor calculations using the Insilico code

In this paper we describe the reactor physics simulation capabilities of the Insilico code. A description of the various capabilities of the code is provided, including detailed discussion of the geometry, meshing, cross section processing, and neutron transport options. Numerical results demonstrate that Insilico using an SPN solver with pin-homogenized cross section generation is capable of delivering highly accurate full-core simulation of various pressurized water reactor problems. Comparison to both Monte Carlo calculations and measured plant data is provided.

Application of the Denovo Discrete Ordinates Radiation Transport Code to Large-Scale Fusion Neutronics

Abstract Fusion energy systems pose unique challenges to the modeling and simulation community. These challenges must be met to ensure the success of the ITER experimental fusion reactor. ITER’s complex systems require detailed modeling that goes beyond the scale of comparable simulations to date. In this work, the Denovo radiation transport code was used to calculate neutron fluence and kerma for the JET streaming benchmark. This work was performed on the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Denovo is a novel three-dimensional discrete ordinates transport code designed to be highly scalable. Sensitivity studies have been completed to examine the impact of several deterministic parameters. Results were compared against experiment as well as the MCNP and Shift Monte Carlo codes.