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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Suetsugu Jagawa, Takashi Yoshii, Akihiro Fukao
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 138 | Number 1 | May 2001 | Pages 67-77
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE00-44
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An automated system for designing a loading pattern (LP) for boiling water reactors (BWRs) given a reference LP and control rod (CR) sequence has been developed. This system employs the advanced nodal code SIMULATE-3 and a BWR LP optimization code FINELOAD-3, which uses a simple linear perturbation method and a modified Tabu search method to select potential optimized LP candidates. Both of these unique methods of FINELOAD-3 were developed to achieve an effective BWR LP optimization strategy and to have high computational efficiency. FINELOAD-3 also adjusts deep CR positions to compensate for the core reactivity deviation caused by fuel shuffling. The objective function is to maximize the end-of-cycle core reactivity while satisfying the specified thermal margins and cold shutdown margin constraints. This optimization system realized the practical application for real BWR LP design. Computer time needed to obtain an optimized LP for a typical BWR/5 octant core with 15 depletion steps is ~4 h using an engineering workstation. This system was extensively tested for real BWR reload core designs and showed that the developed LPs using this system are equivalent or better than the manually optimized LPs.