Date of Award

2026-08-01

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Physics

Advisor(s)

Jorge Lopez

Abstract

This thesis develops and demonstrates a workflow for mapping the spatial distribution of reactor electron antineutrino flux around the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) using three-dimensional mesh tallies from the SCALE 6.3.1 Monte Carlo transport suite. A detailed HFIR model is executed with KENO, and the mesh-tally output is post-processed to construct a voxelized antineutrino source term. The source field is normalized to reactor power and propagated to sampled spatial points surrounding the reactor to generate three-dimensional source-side flux maps. The main analysis focuses on how the mesh-based HFIR antineutrino flux differs from an ideal point-source approximation. In the point-source model, the flux depends only on radial distance and follows a simple inverse-square decrease. In the SCALE-derived mesh calculation, the source has finite radial and axial extent, so the near-field flux contains small finite-source deviations from the standard 1/r2 trend. These effects are quantified using radial profiles, horizontal line profiles, vertical profiles, point-source ratios, and residual maps. A separate verification study identified and corrected a 3DMAP post-processing issue in distribution-style mtPull output. After correcting the parser to sum the physical tally-value column and skip bin-boundary rows, the extracted source localized near the HFIR core and the large artificial hotspot pattern was removed. The corrected workflow was also applied to external HTTR and HTR-10 reactor cases, demonstrating that the SCALE-to-antineutrino pipeline can process different reactor geometries and both multigroup and continuous-energy mesh-output formats while recovering far-field behavior close to the expected inverse-square trend. The final products include sampled-point flux catalogs, radial and coordinate-dependent flux profiles, residual maps relative to a point-source model, and workflow-validation diagnostics. The results show that a detailed three-dimensional source model is most important in the near field, where finite-source effects are measurable, while the field approaches point-source behavior at larger baselines.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

90 p.

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Jacob Adam Mireles

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Physics Commons

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