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Fusion Science and Technology
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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Bilge Ozgener
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 308-313
Modeling and Simulations | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13438
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Discrete ordinates solutions of the neutron transport equation require the solution of the within-group transport equation by the method of iteration on the scattering source. Scattering source iterations are hampered by extremely slow convergence rates when the medium is highly scattering. Among the methods proposed for the acceleration of the scattering source iterations, the coarse mesh rebalance and the diffusion synthetic acceleration techniques appear to be the most prominent ones. Thus, one or the other has been adopted in most of the SN codes. The numerical studies concerning the effectiveness of these acceleration methods have been made mostly for the planar geometry. There are some studies also for the multidimensional Cartesian geometries. In this study we have tried to assess the merits of these acceleration techniques in a curvilinear coordinate system that is spherical geometry. The performance of both of the acceleration methods have been determined by varying the scattering to total cross section ratio, the mesh size, the degree of anisotropy in scattering for a uniform spherical system. Then the study is extended to multiregion systems some of which are diffusive and in some of which transport effects are important.
