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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Glenn E. Sjoden
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 155 | Number 2 | February 2007 | Pages 179-189
Technical Paper | Mathematics and Computation, Supercomputing, Reactor Physics and Nuclear and Biological Applications | doi.org/10.13182/NSE07-A2655
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new exponential spatial differencing scheme based on zeroth spatial transport moments, the exponential directional iterative (EDI) Sn scheme for three-dimensional (3-D) Cartesian geometry, is presented. The EDI scheme is a logical extension of the positive, efficient exponential directional weighted (EDW) method used in the PENTRAN parallel Sn solver in an adaptive differencing strategy. The EDI scheme uses EDW-rendered exponential coefficients as initial values to begin a fixed-point iteration to refine exponential coefficients. Iterative refinement of these coefficients typically converged in fewer than four fixed-point iterations per ordinate, and yielded more accurate angular fluxes compared to other schemes tested. Overall, the EDI scheme is an order of magnitude more accurate than EDW, and two orders of magnitude more accurate than the legacy diamond zero (DZ) scheme for a given mesh. EDI is therefore a good candidate for a fourth-level scheme in the PENTRAN adaptive sequence. The 3-D Cartesian computational cost of EDI was ~20% more than EDW, and only ~40% more than DZ. Thus, EDI renders increased accuracy using zeroth spatial transport moments in a straightforward manner for any 3-D Cartesian code. More evaluation is ongoing to determine suitability in an upgraded adaptive differencing sequence algorithm in PENTRAN.