Practical semi-heterogeneous method in nodal core analysis

Environmental errors introduced during cross-section generation is addressed in this work. A semi-heterogeneous embedded scheme is used to adjust cross-sections and discontinuity factors on-the-fly for full-core calculations. This scheme is tested on PWR and MTR benchmarks and test problems which exhibit environmental errors; while improving the accuracy of the solution significantly, it largely retains the performance advantage of traditional nodal methods. (authors)