Monte carlo Techniques for the Comprehensive Modeling of Isotopic Inventories in Future Nuclear Systems and Fuel Cycles

The development of Monte Carlo techniques for isotopic inventory analysis has been explored in order to facilitate the modeling of systems with flowing streams of material through varying neutron irradiation environments. This represents a novel application of Monte Carlo methods to a field that has traditionally relied on deterministic solutions to systems of first-order differential equations. The Monte Carlo techniques were based largely on the known modeling techniques of Monte Carlo radiation transport, but with important differences, particularly in the area of variance reduction and efficiency measurement. The software that was developed to implement and test these methods now provides a basis for validating approximate modeling techniques that are available to deterministic methodologies. The Monte Carlo methods have been shown to be effective in reproducing the solutions of simple problems that are possible using both stochastic and deterministic methods. The Monte Carlo methods are also effective for tracking flows of materials through complex systems including the ability to model removal of individual elements or isotopes in the system. Computational performance is best for flows that have characteristic times that are large fractions of the system lifetime. As the characteristic times become short, leading to thousands or millions of passes through the system, the computational performance drops significantly. Further research is underway to determine modeling techniques to improve performance within this range of problems. This report describes the technical development of Monte Carlo techniques for isotopic inventory analysis. The primary motivation for this solution methodology is the ability to model systems of flowing material being exposed to varying and stochastically varying radiation environments. The methodology was developed in three stages: analog methods which model each atom with true reaction probabilities (Section 2), non-analog methods which bias the probability distributions while adjusting atom weights to preserve a fair game (Section 3), and efficiency measures to provide local and global measures of the effectiveness of the non-analog methods (Section 4). Following this development, the MCise (Monte Carlo isotope simulation engine) software was used to explore the efficiency of different modeling techniques (Section 5)