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Breaking ground on a new approach to construction
The drive to Kairos Power’s reactor demonstration site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is not only scenic—it’s historic. Nearly 85 years ago, roughly 30,000 construction workers transformed orchards and farmland into a key Manhattan Project site. Depending on your route, you may pass by one of the three gatehouses that were once military checkpoints controlling access to Atomic Energy Commission production facilities.
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.