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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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NRC approves V.C. Summer’s second license renewal
Dominion Energy’s V.C. Summer nuclear power plant, in Jenkinsville, S.C., has been authorized to operate for 80 years, until August 2062, following the renewal of its operating license by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a second time.
Randal S. Baker
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 141 | Number 1 | May 2002 | Pages 1-12
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE02-A2262
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We describe the development and implementation of a block-based adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) algorithm for solving the discrete ordinates neutral particle transport equation. AMR algorithms allow mesh refinement in areas of interest without requiring the extension of this refinement throughout the entire problem geometry, minimizing the number of computational cells required for calculations. The block-based AMR algorithm described here is a hybrid between traditional cell or patch-based approaches and is designed to allow an efficient parallel solution of the transport equation while still reducing the cell count.This paper discusses the data structure implementation and CPU/memory efficiency for our Block AMR method, the equations and procedures used in mapping edge fluxes between blocks of different refinement levels for both diamond and linear discontinuous spatial discretizations, effects of AMR on mesh convergence, and our approach to parallelization. Comparisons between our Block AMR method and a traditional single-level mesh are presented for a sample brachytherapy problem. The Block AMR results are shown to be significantly faster for this problem (on at least a few processors), while still returning an accurate solution.