Shielding Calculations for a Spent Fuel Storage Cask: A Comparison of Discrete Ordinates, Monte Carlo, and Hybrid Methods

Abstract

In this study, discrete ordinates and Monte Carlo methods were applied to solve the radiation transport problem for a simplified spent fuel storage cask considering fixed neutron and gamma-ray sources. The results were compared, and the causes for their differences were investigated. In addition, a hybrid method based on the Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) methodology has been adopted to accelerate the Monte Carlo simulations. CADIS utilizes a deterministic adjoint function for variance reduction through source biasing and consistent transport biasing. The problem encountered and its possible solution for applying the source biasing in such a large volume source are described. Compared with the unbiased case, the computational efficiency is improved by a factor of several tens for neutron transport, and the efficiency is increased tremendously by about five orders of magnitude for gamma-ray transport. It has been demonstrated that the biasing scheme applied here is very effective in the shielding calculations for a spent fuel storage cask using the Monte Carlo method.