Unveiling the Future of Reactor Design: MaThRad’s Valeria Raffuzzi presents new results at PHYSOR24

Valeria Raffuzzi and MaThRad Co-Investigator, Prof. Eugene Shwageraus attended the International Conference on Reactor Physics PHYSOR24, taking place in San Francisco in April.

The focus of the conference is on new reactor design and technology, as well as Monte Carlo and deterministic methods to model the neutron transport equation, validation and verification, and nuclear data. PHYSOR24 was attended by members of the academia and of the international nuclear national laboratories, and by industries that are key players in the nuclear sector such as Westinghouse, TerraPower, Rolls Royce, Studsvik, and more.

During PHYSOR24 Valeria presented her paper titled ‘Application of the Random Ray method to Global Variance Reduction in Radiation Shielding Problems’. In this work, the variance reduction method FW-CADIS is implemented in the new Random Ray solver in the University of Cambridge in-house Monte Carlo code SCONE, and tested on a shielding problem. The results confirm that Random Ray is perfectly suited for Monte Carlo variance reduction in realistic problems of interest to the fission and fusion nuclear industries; future work is underway to expand the capabilities of this solver to detector and multiple detector problems.