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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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April 2024
Nuclear Technology
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February 2024
Latest News
Can hydrogen be the transportation fuel in an otherwise nuclear economy?
Let’s face it: The global economy should be powered primarily by nuclear power. And it probably will by the end of this century, with a still-significant assist from renewables and hydro. Once nuclear systems are dominant, the costs come down to where gas is now; and when carbon emissions are reduced to a small portion of their present state, it will become obvious that most other sources are only good in niche settings. I mean, why use small modular reactors to load-follow when they can just produce that power instead of buffering it?
Peiwei Sun, Jin Jiang, Kai Wang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 185 | Number 3 | March 2014 | Pages 239-258
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-130
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Canadian supercritical water-cooled reactor (SCWR) can be modeled as a multiple-input multiple-output system. It has a high power-to-flow ratio, strong cross coupling, and a high degree of nonlinearity in its dynamic characteristics. Because of the existence of strong cross coupling among system inputs and outputs, it is difficult for a traditional control system design methodology to produce a satisfactory control system. In this paper, the direct Nyquist array method is used first to decouple the system into a diagonally dominant form via a precompensator. After decoupling the system successfully, three single-input single-output dynamic compensators are synthesized in the frequency domain. By using the precompensator, the temperature variation because of disturbances at the reactor power and pressure is significantly reduced. The control system can effectively maintain the overall system stability and regulate the plant around a specified operating condition. To deal with the nonlinearities, a control strategy based on gain scheduling is adopted. Different sets of controllers are used for the plant at different load conditions. The proposed control strategies have been evaluated under various operating scenarios. The robustness of the controller with respect to operating condition changes is also investigated. It is shown that the decoupling control can effectively reduce the cross coupling inherent in the Canadian SCWR, and gain scheduling control can successfully achieve satisfactory performance for different operating conditions.