MaThRad @ ANSWERS 2023: Reactor Physics Workshop

The ANSWERS software service, managed within Jacobs Solutions, is at the forefront of research and development within the nuclear industry, developing high quality software for customers world-wide. ANSWERS software is widely used throughout the nuclear industry in the UK and worldwide as well as in medical applications, furthermore, ANSWERS software has also been used for space applications. Building on the long history of collaboration between ANSWERS and departments of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and Engineering at the University of Cambridge and the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistical Applied Mathematics (SAMBa), the MaThRad team were delighted contribute to the 2023 ANSWERS Seminar – an annual meeting for ANSWERS customers and staff associated with the development and use of ANSWERS software. Using the successful Integrative Think Tank (ITT) model, which was pioneered and developed by SAMBa, MaThRad hosted two days of talks which focussed on the numerical methods used by ANSWERS.

The workshop began with introductions on the Monte Carlo software tools MONK (Jacobs), and SCONE (Cambridge) and then focussed on three main topics: Fission Source Convergence, The Random Ray method and Particle Clustering. View the full programme and presentations here.

The workshop generated some lively discussions which lead to ideas and plans that will be developed over the coming months. We look forward to growing and strengthening the partnership with Jacobs\ANSWERS.