• Korean Security Journal
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• no.37
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• pp.325-354
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• 2013

The concept of national security and the fundamental system for crisis management have departed from traditional methods and the importance of a national critical infrastructure crisis management has been emphasized. A national critical infrastructure crisis means a situation where human resource, material and functional system that may have a material effect on the critical functions of the government, the vitality and integrity of society, national economy and the safety of the public becomes disabled due to causes such as terrorism or major disasters. Although North Korea had been subject to numerous rounds of negotiations and sanctions as it continually developed nuclear weapons since the 1960s, it has also showed off its nuclear armaments through successful nuclear testings and missile launches. As the development and threat of North Korea's weapons of mass destruction becomes more noticeable and the range of its risk expands, this study focuses on the potential for an absence of leadership for national crisis management where the country's leadership, which should serve the critical role and function of handling national crises, becomes completely destroyed by the unexpected initial attacks by North Korea. As a result, the purpose of this study is to propose safety measures for the country's leadership in preparation for North Korea's threat of nuclear weapons by examining the concept and degree of risk of weapons of mass destruction with a focus on nuclear weapons, analyzing the substance of the threat of North Korean nuclear weapons and evaluating such threat. In conclusion, first, to ensure the normal functioning of a national crisis management system in the event of a national crisis, we must seek safety measures that conform to the scope and succession order of the leadership of the national crisis management for an Enduring Constitutional Government (ECG) and the Continuity Of Operations (COOP). Second, in the event of a national ceremony, the gathering of the country's leadership all together in an open place should be avoided. In unavoidable circumstances, the next in rank that will act on behalf of the current leader should be designated and relevant safety measures should be taken. Third, during time of peace, in preparation for national crises, the scope of protection for the country's leadership should be prescribed and specific security and safety measures should be implemented. Fourth, the succession order for acting president in the case of the death of the president pursuant to Articles 71 and 26(1) of the National Government Organization Act should reconsidered to see whether it is a reasonable provision that takes into consideration a national crisis management that corresponds to the threat of North Korean nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. Pursuant to the Basic Guidelines for National Crisis Management set out under Presidential Directive No. 229, the Korean government is currently operating a case-by-case "crisis management standard manual" and its sub-manuals and has also prepared the Presidential Security Service's security and safety measure regulations regarding the acting president. Therefore, the Korean government should actualize the above points in the case-by-case crisis management standard manual and security and safety measure regulations regarding the acting president to implement and legislate them.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.209-217
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• 2020

North Korea has steadily implemented defense reforms to strengthen its national defense capabilities, and in particular, has made military technology development and military industrial capability strengthening as the focus of national defense reform. North Korea's defense reform ultimately aimed at securing nuclear posture, and as technical achievements accumulated in the Kim Jung-Un era, it led to the development of military strength such as hydrogen bombs and ICBM/SLBM. Having secured nuclear capability, North Korea is also pursuing a symmetricality in the conventional military strength by securing a strategic advantage by pursuing the modernization of the conventional weapon systems through defense reform again. Up to now, North Korea's defense reform has succeeded in establishing a new ruling system for Kim Jung-Un and creating a driving force for negotiations with the United States.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.6
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• pp.1137-1147
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• 2020

The discrete ordinates method (S_N) is one of the major shielding calculation method, which is suitable for solving deep-penetration transport problems. Our objective is to explore the available quadrature sets and to improve the accuracy in shielding problems involving strong anisotropy. The linear discontinuous finite-element (LDFE) quadrature sets based on the icosahedron (in short, ICLDFE quadrature sets) are developed by defining projected points on the surfaces of the icosahedron. Weights are then introduced in the integration of the discontinuous finite-element basis functions in the relevant angular regions. The multivariate secant method is used to optimize the discrete directions and their corresponding weights. The numerical integration of polynomials in the direction cosines and the Kobayashi benchmark are used to analyze and verify the properties of these new quadrature sets. Results show that the ICLDFE quadrature sets can exactly integrate the zero-order and first-order of the spherical harmonic functions over one-twentieth of the spherical surface. As for the Kobayashi benchmark problem, the maximum relative error between the fifth-order ICLDFE quadrature sets and references is only -0.55%. The ICLDFE quadrature sets provide better integration precision of the spherical harmonic functions in local discrete angle domains and higher accuracy for simple shielding problems.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.7
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• pp.2625-2634
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• 2022

Discretization errors are extremely challenging conundrums of discrete ordinates calculations for radiation transport problems with void regions. In previous work, we have presented a multi-collision source method (MCS) to overcome discretization errors, but the efficiency needs to be improved. This paper proposes a goal-oriented algorithm for the MCS method to adaptively determine the partitioning of the geometry and dynamically change the angular quadrature in remaining iterations. The importance factor based on the adjoint transport calculation obtains the response function to get a problem-dependent, goal-oriented spatial decomposition. The difference in the scalar fluxes from one high-order quadrature set to a lower one provides the error estimation as a driving force behind the dynamic quadrature. The goal-oriented algorithm allows optimizing by using ray-tracing technology or high-order quadrature sets in the first few iterations and arranging the integration order of the remaining iterations from high to low. The algorithm has been implemented in the 3D transport code ARES and was tested on the Kobayashi benchmarks. The numerical results show a reduction in computation time on these problems for the same desired level of accuracy as compared to the standard ARES code, and it has clear advantages over the traditional MCS method in solving radiation transport problems with reflective boundary conditions.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.1428-1438
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• 2023

A novel Fission Diffusion Synthetic Acceleration (FDSA) method is developed and implemented as a part of a hybrid neutronics method for source convergence acceleration and variance reduction in Monte Carlo (MC) criticality calculations. The acceleration of the MC calculation stems from constructing a synthetic operator and solving a low-order problem using information obtained from previous MC calculations. By applying the P₁ approximation, two correction terms, one for the scalar flux and the other for the current, can be solved in the low-order problem and applied to the transport solution. A variety of one-dimensional (1-D) and two-dimensional (2-D) numerical tests are constructed to demonstrate the performance of FDSA in comparison with the standalone MC method and the coupled MC and Coarse Mesh Finite Difference (MC-CMFD) method on both intended purposes. The comparison results show that the acceleration by a factor of 3-10 can be expected for source convergence and the reduction in MC variance is comparable to CMFD in both slab and full core geometries, although the effectiveness of such hybrid methods is limited to systems with small dominance ratios.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.43 no.6
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• pp.547-556
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• 2011

Two computational methods for determining equilibrium states for the Mark-IV electrorefiner (ER) have been assessed to improve the current computational electrorefiner model developed at University of Idaho. Both methods were validated against measured data to better understand their effects on the calculation of the equilibrium compositions in the ER. In addition, a sensitivity study was performed on the effect of specific unknown activity coefficients-including sodium in molten cadmium, zirconium in molten cadmium, and sodium chloride in molten LiCl-KCl. Both computational methods produced identical results, which stayed within the 95% confidence interval of the experimental data. Furthermore, sensitivity to unavailable activity coefficients was found to be low (a change in concentration of less than 3 ppm).

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.1-25
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• 2020

The international community's sanctions against North Korea, triggered by North Korea's nuclear tests and by missile development in the country, are considered the strongest sanctions in history, banning exports of North Korea's major items and limiting imports of machinery and oil products. Accordingly, North Korea's trade volume decreased to the level of collapse after the sanctions, meaning that the sanctions against North Korea were considered to be effective. However, according to this paper, which analyzed the price fluctuations of refined petroleum products in North Korea through the methodology of an event study, the market prices of oil products were only temporarily affected by the sanctions and remained stable over the long run despite the restrictions on the volumes of refined petroleum products introduced. This can be explained by evidence that North Korea has introduced refined oil supplies that are not much different from those before the sanctions through its use of illegal transshipments even after the sanctions. With regard to strategic materials such as refined oil, the North Korean authorities are believed to be desperately avoiding sanctions by, for instance, finding loopholes in the sanctions to meet the minimum level of demand.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.1204-1212
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• 2024

To accurately calculate the heating distribution of the fast reactor, a neutron-photon library in MATXS format named Knight-B7.1-1968n × 94γ was processed based on the ENDF/B-VII.1 library for ultrafine groups. The neutron cross-section processing code MGGC2.0 was used to generate few-group neutron cross sections in ISOTXS format. Additionally, the self-developed photon cross-section processing code NGAMMA was utilized to generate photon libraries for neutron-photon coupled heating calculations, including photo-atom cross sections for the ISOTXS format, prompt photon production cross sections, and kinetic energy release in materials (KERMA) factors for neutrons and photons, and the self-shielding effect from the capture and fission cross sections of neutron to photon have been taken into account when the photon source generated by neutron is calculated. The interface code GSORCAL was developed to generate the photon source distribution and interface with the DIF3D code to calculate the neutron-photon coupling heating distribution of the fast reactor core. The neutron-photon coupled heating calculation route was verified using the ZPPR-9 benchmark and the RBEC-M benchmark, and the results of the coupled heating calculations were analyzed in comparison with those obtained from the Monte Carlo code MCNP. The calculations show that the library was accurately processed, and the results of the fast reactor neutron-photon coupled heating calculations agree well with those obtained from MCNP.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.49 no.6
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• pp.1219-1225
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• 2017

In this work, a scalable algorithm for model calibration in nuclear engineering applications is presented and tested. The algorithm relies on the construction of surrogate models to replace the original model within the region of interest. These surrogate models can be constructed efficiently via reduced order modeling and subspace analysis. Once constructed, these surrogate models can be used to perform computationally expensive mathematical analyses. This work proposes a surrogate based model calibration algorithm. The proposed algorithm is used to calibrate various neutronics and thermal-hydraulics parameters. The virtual environment for reactor applications-core simulator (VERA-CS) is used to simulate a three-dimensional core depletion problem. The proposed algorithm is then used to construct a reduced order model (a surrogate) which is then used in a Bayesian approach to calibrate the neutronics and thermal-hydraulics parameters. The algorithm is tested and the benefits of data assimilation and calibration are highlighted in an uncertainty quantification study and requantification after the calibration process. Results showed that the proposed algorithm could help to reduce the uncertainty in key reactor attributes based on experimental and operational data.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.50 no.7
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• pp.1106-1111
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• 2018

Electromagnetic waves potentially have been used to heat overdense nuclear fusion plasmas through a double mode conversion from ordinary to slow extraordinary and finally to Electron Bernstein Wave (EBW) modes, OSXB. This scheme is efficient and has not any plasma density limit of electron cyclotron resonance heating due to cut-off layer. The efficiency of conversion depends on the isotropic launching angles of the microwaves with the plasma parameters. In this article, a two-step mode conversions of OSXB power transmission efficiency affected by the fast extraordinary (FX) loses at upper hybrid frequency are studied. In addition, the kinetic (hot) dispersion relation of a overdense plasma in a full wave analysis of a OSXB in Wendelstein 7X (W7-X) stellarator plasma has been numerically simulated. The influence of plasma dependent parameters such as finite Larmor radius, electron thermal velocity and electron cyclotron frequency are represented.