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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Hash Hashemian: Visionary leadership
As Dr. Hashem M. “Hash” Hashemian prepares to step into his term as President of the American Nuclear Society, he is clear that he wants to make the most of this unique moment.
A groundswell in public approval of nuclear is finding a home in growing governmental support that is backed by a tailwind of technological innovation. “Now is a good time to be in nuclear,” Hashemian said, as he explained the criticality of this moment and what he hoped to accomplish as president.
Zhian Li, Samuel H. Levine
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 118 | Number 2 | October 1994 | Pages 67-78
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE94-A28536
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An automatic optimal pressurized water reactor (PWR) reload design expert system AUTOLOAD has been developed. It employs two important new techniques. The first is a new loading priority scheme that defines the optimal placement of the fuel in the core that has the maximum end-of-cycle state keff. The second is a new power-shape-driven progressive iteration method for automatically determining the burnable poison (BP) loading in the fresh fuel assemblies. The Haling power distribution is used in converting the theoretically optimal solution into the practical design, which meets the design constraints for the given fuel assemblies. AUTOLOAD is a combination of C and FORTRAN languages. It requires only the required cycle length, the maximum peak normalized power, the BP type, the number of fresh fuel assemblies, the assembly burnup, and BP histories of the available fuel assemblies as its input. Knowledge-based modules have been built into the expert system computer code to perform all of the tasks involved in reloading a PWR. AUTOLOAD takes only ∼30 CPU min on an IBM 3090 600s mainframe to accomplish a practical reload design. A maximum of 12.5% fresh fuel enrichment saving is observed compared with the core used by the utility.
