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Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Artenio De Matteis, Rolando Simonini
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 65 | Number 1 | January 1978 | Pages 93-105
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE78-A27129
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A class of stochastic models for the Monte Carlo integration of the adjoint neutron transport equation is described. Some current general methods are brought within this class, thus preparing the ground for subsequent comparisons. Monte Carlo integration of the adjoint Boltzmann equation can be seen as a simulation of the transport of mathematical particles with reaction kernels not normalized to unity. This last feature is a source of difficulty: It can influence the variance of the result negatively and also often leads to preparation of special “libraries” consisting of tables of normalization factors as functions of energy, presently used by several methods. These are the two main points that are discussed and that are taken into account to devise a nonmultigroup method of solution for a certain class of problems. Reactions considered in detail are radiative capture, elastic scattering, discrete levels and continuum inelastic scattering, for which the need for tables has been almost completely eliminated. The basic policy pursued to avoid a source of statistical fluctuations is to try to make the statistical weight of the traveling particle dependent only on its starting and current energies, at least in simple cases. The effectiveness of the sampling schemes proposed is supported by numerical comparison with other more general adjoint Monte Carlo methods. Computation of neutron flux at a point by means of an adjoint formulation is the problem taken as a test for numerical experiments. Very good results have been obtained in the difficult case of resonant cross sections.