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The two reactors at Dominion Energy’s Surry plant are among the oldest in the U.S. nuclear fleet. Yet when the plant celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023, staff could raise a toast to the future. Surry was one of the first plants to file a subsequent license renewal (SLR) application, and in May 2021, it became official: the plant was licensed to operate for a full 80 years, extending its reactors’ lifespans into 2052 and 2053.
Robert C. Ward, Randal S. Baker, Jim E. Morel
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 152 | Number 2 | February 2006 | Pages 164-179
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2573
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A multidimensional block-based adaptive mesh refinement (BAMR) method for the neutral particle transport equation with diamond and linear discontinuous spatial differencing was developed several years ago. This method was implemented in the PARallel TIme-dependent SN (PARTISN) deterministic transport code. However, the only source acceleration method available with BAMR was transport synthetic acceleration. Although the block-based adaptive mesh is orthogonal, the individual mesh cells may not be simply connected. Because of this lack of simple connectivity, development of a fully consistent diffusion synthetic acceleration (DSA) method has not been possible. This paper describes the development of a DSA method based upon an additive correction to the scalar flux iterate after a transport sweep. This DSA equation is differenced using a vertex-centered diffusion discretization that is diamond-like and may be characterized as "partially" consistent. It does not appear algebraically possible to derive a diffusion discretization that is fully consistent with diamond transport differencing on AMR meshes. The diffusion matrix is symmetric positive definite, and the DSA method is effective for most applications. This BAMR-DSA solver has been implemented and tested in two dimensions for rectangular (X-Y) and cylindrical (R-Z) geometries. As expected, results confirm that a partially consistent BAMR-DSA method will introduce instabilities for extreme cases (e.g., scattering ratios approaching 1.0 with optically thick cells), but for most realistic problems, e.g., the iron-water shielding problem, the BAMR-DSA method provides an effective acceleration method.