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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.
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.