M-PRISM research
Lunar fission surface power: shielding and autonomous control
Lunar Fission Surface Power: Radiation Shielding and Autonomous Control
Most of the dose near a lunar habitat comes through the regolith, not through the reactor shield.
We develop methods for large-scale radiation shielding analysis of fission surface power reactors for lunar exploration, combining deterministic transport and variance-reduced Monte Carlo to make dose calculations tractable for realistic geometries.
In our first study, FW-CADIS variance reduction made the dose calculation 5 times faster. A visiting student now compares variance-reduction methods and doses across shield thickness, material, distance, and regolith composition in OpenMC.
A second track builds an AI-driven digital twin for autonomous control of a lunar fission surface power microreactor.
