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Modernizing I&C for operations and maintenance, one phase at a time
The two reactors at Dominion Energy’s Surry plant are among the oldest in the U.S. nuclear fleet. Yet when the plant celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023, staff could raise a toast to the future. Surry was one of the first plants to file a subsequent license renewal (SLR) application, and in May 2021, it became official: the plant was licensed to operate for a full 80 years, extending its reactors’ lifespans into 2052 and 2053.
Yaqi Wang, Jean C. Ragusa
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 166 | Number 2 | October 2010 | Pages 145-166
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-46
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Diffusion synthetic acceleration (DSA) schemes compatible with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) grids are derived for the SN transport equations discretized using high-order discontinuous finite elements. These schemes are directly obtained from the discretized transport equations by assuming a linear dependence in angle of the angular flux along with an exact Fick's law and, therefore, are categorized as partially consistent. These schemes are akin to the symmetric interior penalty technique applied to elliptic problems and are all based on a second-order discontinuous finite element discretization of a diffusion equation (as opposed to a mixed or P1 formulation). Therefore, they only have the scalar flux as unknowns. A Fourier analysis has been carried out to determine the convergence properties of the three proposed DSA schemes for various cell optical thicknesses and aspect ratios. Out of the three DSA schemes derived, the modified interior penalty (MIP) scheme is stable and effective for realistic problems, even with distorted elements, but loses effectiveness for some highly heterogeneous configurations. The MIP scheme is also symmetric positive definite and can be solved efficiently with a preconditioned conjugate gradient method. Its implementation in an AMR SN transport code has been performed for both source iteration and GMRes-based transport solves, with polynomial orders up to 4. Numerical results are provided and show good agreement with the Fourier analysis results. Results on AMR grids demonstrate that the cost of DSA can be kept low on locally refined meshes.