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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
R. Ponciroli, Y. Wang, Z. Zhou, A. Botterud, J. Jenkins, R. B. Vilim, F. Ganda
Nuclear Technology | Volume 200 | Number 3 | December 2017 | Pages 189-207
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1388668
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work explores the technical challenges associated with flexible operation for nuclear power plants (NPPs) and evaluates whether a flexible operational mode could improve the profitability of nuclear units by allowing nuclear plant owners/operators to reduce output when prices are low and instead shift capacity to the ancillary services markets. As compared to conventional power plants, NPP flexible operation capabilities are affected by additional physics-induced constraints. Among the most limiting constraints is the negative reactivity insertion following every reactor power drop due to the increased concentration of xenon, a strong neutron poison. In this work, a previously available power system operation model based on mixed-integer linear programming optimization was improved by implementing a dedicated representation of these physics-induced constraints for pressurized water reactors (PWRs). Because the xenon-related constraint involves nonlinear governing dynamics, a dedicated parametric approach was implemented. To evaluate the economic implications of flexible PWR operation, a case study using realistic power system data representative of the southwestern United States was analyzed. The results indicate that flexible operation can increase the revenue of nuclear units while at the same time reducing total electric system operating costs.