On integrating Monte Carlo calculations in and around near-critical configurations – II. Pressurized water reactors

This article is the second part of a paper that evaluates a recent approach that has been developed to calculate differential in- and ex-fissile configuration responses employing Monte Carlo with variance reduction. The first part focused more on the methodological aspects and established the circumstances under which a single eigenvalue calculation could be made as efficient as possible, in particular as compared with an empirical approach (involving again a single eigenvalue calculation). Both ex- and in-core test problems were considered. Instead this second part looks at two ex-core PWR sample problems and compares the single eigenvalue approach with an all Monte Carlo decoupled approach with different approximations at the point of decoupling, thus highlighting the sensitivity of the decoupled result to the decoupling approximation