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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
In transition: Commercializing fusion power
Commercial fusion power is closer than ever. There are now around 30 U.S. fusion companies, several of which claim to be on track to connect to the grid as early as the 2030s.
Tokamak and laser inertial confinement approaches benefit from decades of research at facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and ITER, with alternative concepts including stellarator, magnetic mirror, and Z-pinch confinement also making notable progress as private and government funding for fusion increases.
Mihály Makai
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 82 | Number 3 | December 1982 | Pages 338-353
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE82-338
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Solving problems of reactor physics is well developed for typical pressurized water and boiling water reactor geometries but less developed for high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, liquid-metal fast breeder reactor, and WWER (BBP) geometries. Several problems of reactor physics can be formulated in a geometry-independent fashion with the help of symmetry considerations, which allows the solution to be decomposed into eigenfunctions of the symmetry operations. An analytic coarse-mesh solution is derived without resorting to the cross leakage concept. The method is applicable to arbitrary geometries. A second-stage homogenization based on the Bloch theorem is presented. It is shown that the solution of the transport equation can always be made up from a cell problem set (microfunctions) and from an overall solution to the diffusion equation (macrofunction).