April 2018

Journal

Nuclide Depletion Capabilities in the Shift Monte Carlo Code

By:
Davidson, Gregory G; Pandya, Tara M; Johnson, Seth R; Evans, Thomas M; Isotalo, Aarno E; Gentry, Cole A; Wieselquist, William A
Journal Name:
Annals of Nuclear Energy
Page Number:
259-276
Volume:
114
Publication Date:
April 2018
View DOI Listing:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anucene.2017.11.042

Abstract

A new depletion capability has been developed in the Exnihilo radiation transport code suite. This capability enables massively parallel domain-decomposed coupling between the Shift continuous-energy Monte Carlo solver and the nuclide depletion solvers in ORIGEN to perform high-performance Monte Carlo depletion calculations. This paper describes this new depletion capability and discusses its various features, including a multi-level parallel decomposition, high-order transport-depletion coupling, and energy-integrated power renormalization. Several test problems are presented to validate the new capability against other Monte Carlo depletion codes, and the parallel performance of the new capability is analyzed.