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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Powering the future: How the DOE is fueling nuclear fuel cycle research and development
As global interest in nuclear energy surges, the United States must remain at the forefront of research and development to ensure national energy security, advance nuclear technologies, and promote international cooperation on safety and nonproliferation. A crucial step in achieving this is analyzing how funding and resources are allocated to better understand how to direct future research and development. The Department of Energy has spearheaded this effort by funding hundreds of research projects across the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). This initiative has empowered dozens of universities to collaborate toward a nuclear-friendly future.
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.
