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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.
Anne-Marie Baudron, Jean-Jacques Lautard
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 155 | Number 2 | February 2007 | Pages 250-263
Technical Paper | Mathematics and Computation, Supercomputing, Reactor Physics and Nuclear and Biological Applications | doi.org/10.13182/NSE07-A2660
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes a new generation of the neutronic core solver MINOS resulting from developments done in the DESCARTES project. For performance reasons, the numerical method of the existing MINOS solver in the SAPHYR system has been reused in the new system. It is based on the mixed-dual finite element approximation of the simplified transport equation. We have extended the previous method to the treatment of unstructured geometries composed by quadrilaterals, allowing us to treat geometries where fuel pins are exactly represented. For Cartesian geometries, the solver takes into account assembly discontinuity coefficients in the simplified Pn context. The solver has been rewritten in C++ programming language using an object-oriented design. Its general architecture was reconsidered in order to improve its capability of evolution and its maintainability. Moreover, the performance of the previous version has been improved mainly regarding the matrix construction time; this result improves significantly the performance of the solver in the context of industrial application requiring thermal-hydraulic feedback and depletion calculations.
