G4-STORK: A Geant4-based Monte Carlo reactor kinetics simulation code

• G4-STORK is a new, time-dependent, Monte Carlo code for reactor physics applications.
• G4-STORK was built by adapting and expanding on the Geant4 Monte Carlo toolkit.
• G4-STORK was designed to simulate short-term fluctuations in reactor cores.
• G4-STORK is well suited for simulating sub- and supercritical assemblies.
• G4-STORK was verified through comparisons with DRAGON and MCNP.

In this paper we introduce G4-STORK (Geant4 STOchastic Reactor Kinetics), a new, time-dependent, Monte Carlo particle tracking code for reactor physics applications. G4-STORK was built by adapting and expanding on the Geant4 Monte Carlo toolkit. The toolkit provides the fundamental physics models and particle tracking algorithms that track each particle in space and time. It is a framework for further development (e.g. for projects such as G4-STORK).G4-STORK derives reactor physics parameters (e.g. keffkeff) from the continuous evolution of a population of neutrons in space and time in the given simulation geometry. In this paper we detail the major additions to the Geant4 toolkit that were necessary to create G4-STORK. These include a renormalization process that maintains a manageable number of neutrons in the simulation even in very sub- or supercritical systems, scoring processes (e.g. recording fission locations, total neutrons produced and lost, etc.) that allow G4-STORK to calculate the reactor physics parameters, and dynamic simulation geometries that can change over the course of simulation to illicit reactor kinetics responses (e.g. fuel temperature reactivity feedback).The additions are verified through simple simulations and code-to-code comparisons with established reactor physics codes such as DRAGON and MCNP. Additionally, G4-STORK was developed to run a single simulation in parallel over many processors using MPI (Message Passing Interface) pipes.