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DOE selects first companies for nuclear launch pad
The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy and the National Reactor Innovation Center have announced their first selections for the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad: three companies developing microreactors and one developing fuel supply.
The four companies—Deployable Energy, General Matter, NuCube Energy, and Radiant Industries—were selected from the initial pool of Reactor Pilot Program and Fuel Line Pilot Program applicants, the two precursor programs to the launch pad.
Massimiliano Fratoni, Ehud Greenspan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 166 | Number 1 | September 2010 | Pages 1-16
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-66
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The capability to perform depletion analysis of pebble bed reactors has been traditionally limited to a few dedicated codes that are designed for helium-cooled reactors, rely on pregenerated problem-dependent group cross sections, and have limited flexibility in the materials and in the geometries they can model. This paper presents a newly developed tool to search for pebble bed reactor core equilibrium composition and calculate its neutronic characteristics. It uses MCNP for transport calculations and ORIGEN2 for depletion calculations and can generate effective one-group cross sections “on-the-fly” as pebbles move through the core using point-energy cross sections. This tool can be used for any coolant type including liquid salt, can model complex geometries, and can account for any level of heterogeneity. Also developed are two simplified methodologies that are based on unit-cell analysis and can considerably reduce the required computational time; they are useful for parametric studies.