ORIGEN and Open Source

Attending

• Max Fratoni
• Katy Huff
• Kelly Rowland
• Alejandra Jolodosky
• Sandra Bogetic
• Madicken Munk
• Dan Wooten
• Tenzing Joshi
• Andrey Mironyuk

Discussion: ORIGEN - Max Fratoni

Max gave us an overview of ORIGEN, a depletion code. Max’s presentation can be found here.

Max Fratoni

Max is a professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering.

ORIGEN

• ORIGEN solves the bateman equation
• What you need for the zero dimensional depletion equation to be accurate is simple: accurate cross sections.

ORIGEN-S is within the Scale package and is maintained by the Scale maintainers, whereas ORIGEN2 is standalone. ORIGEN-ARP is a graphical interface for ORIGEN-S. It’s possible to use 3 energy groups in ORIGEN-S and the cross sections are kept up-to-date

• ORIGEN-S tracks depletion for 1946 isotopes.
• HOWEVER, there are only about 300 isotopes in the ENDF database

So, how do we run the code? Max went over the various data we need to input

• material
• data
• depletion data
  • power depletion : need power and time
  • flux irradiation : need flux and time
  • decay : need time

They produce:

• activity
• radiotoxicity
• decay heat
• absorption and fission rates
• neutron emmission
• photon emission

Every material you provide must be one of the three groups

• activation product (720)
• actinide (130)
• fission product (850)

Of course these groups overlap.

You also have to provide information about every nuclide (decay constants, decay heats, etc.) These decay data libraries are plaintext. ORIGEN comes packaged with this information.

You also have to provide the cross section libraries. ORIGEN comes with some of these. The cross section libraries have to be selected carefully.

The input files are TAPE files… because they used to actually be tapes.

Dicussion: Open Source Contribution

We intentionally misspelled everyone’s names and went through the issue-pull-request-review-pull-close workflow seen in many open source projects.