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2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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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.
B. M. Rothleder, G. R. Poetschat, W. S. Faught, W. J. Eich
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 100 | Number 4 | December 1988 | Pages 440-450
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE88-A23577
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The fuel shuffling problem is posed by the need to reposition partially burned assemblies to achieve minimum X-Y pin power peaks in reload cycles of pressurized water reactors. This problem is a classic artificial intelligence (AI) problem and is highly suitable for AI expert system solution assistance, in contrast to the conventional solution, which ultimately depends solely on trial and error. Such a fuel shuffling assistant would significantly reduce engineering and computer execution time for conventional loading patterns and, much more importantly, even more significantly for lowleakage loading patterns. A successful hardware /software demonstrator has been introduced, paving the way for development of a broadly applicable expert system program. Such a program, upon incorporating the recently developed technique of reverse depletion, would provide a directed path for solving the low-leakage problem.