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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Huajiang Jin, Shuaishuai Zhang, Jianxiang Zheng, Jian Zhang, Huifang Miao, Liuxuan Cao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 5 | July 2024 | Pages 682-694
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2232229
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Understanding irradiation-induced degradation processes of nuclear structural materials is essential for creating methodologies and procedures for nuclear reactor safety. Due to the time- and resource-intensive property of both experiments and multiscale simulations of irradiation damage, the trial-and-error approach is completely inefficient. Recently, machine learning techniques have been employed to predict the properties of reduced activation ferritic martensitic (RAFM) steels, such as yield strength and elongation, as well as irradiation embrittlement in steel pressure vessels, with encouraging progress.
In this work, void swelling is predicted using a machine learning method for the first time, taking into account the synergistic effects of displacement damage, helium, and hydrogen. Assisted by the analysis of feature engineering, seven machine learning models are trained and compared by multicriteria evaluation methods. Finally, the parameter-optimized gradient-boosting model is selected as the mapping function with the highest accuracy and universality to predict void swelling. In particular, the dependence of the void swelling and the injection amount of helium and hydrogen in the continuous parameter variation range is predicted beyond the existing experimental data. This work demonstrates the feasibility of machine learning to predict material irradiation damage by synergistic effects and has practical significance in nuclear material optimization and reactor safety.