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RIC panel discusses pathway to fusion commercialization
Fusion leaders at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s annual Regulatory Information Conference discussed the path forward for regulating the burgeoning fusion industry. The speakers discussed government and private industry initiatives in the United States and United Kingdom, with a focus on efforts shaping the near-term deployment of commercial fusion machines.
A recurring theme was the need to explain the difference between fission and fusion. Representatives from the Department of Energy and Type One Energy highlighted this as an important distinction for regulators, as it will allow fusion to undergo its own independent maturation process for developing standards and regulations in the same way that fission has. Lea Perlas, Fusion Program director at the Virginia Department of Health, said that confusion between fission and fusion has been a common cause for misplaced concerns among community members surrounding Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ proposed fusion plant site near Richmond, Va.
Taro Ueki
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 180 | Number 1 | May 2015 | Pages 58-68
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-54
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The overlapping batch means method (OBM) has been investigated for robust statistical error estimation of local power tallies in Monte Carlo (MC) reactor core calculation. Originally, a nonoverlapping version was introduced in MC criticality calculation by Gelbard and Prael. However, the issue of batch size optimization was thought of as a lack of robustness. In this work, OBM with asymptotic bias correction was implemented with the batch size of the square root of the number of generations and compared with the orthonormally weighted standardized time series method (OWSTS). Numerical tests were conducted for various positions of the core of a pressurized water reactor. Results obtained indicate that neither OBM nor OWSTS consistently outperforms the other in terms of an overall performance measure incorporating bias and stability. Therefore, OBM with asymptotic bias correction can be an option to statistical error estimation in production MC criticality codes since OWSTS lacks an automated process to determine the number of weighting functions and can output the estimate only at the final generation. It is also shown that OBM with asymptotic bias correction performs equally regardless of the batch size.