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Modernizing I&C for operations and maintenance, one phase at a time
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.
Dan G. Cacuci, Erkan Arslan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 176 | Number 3 | March 2014 | Pages 339-349
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-31
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work applies the predictive modeling procedure formulated by Cacuci and Ionescu-Bujor [Nucl. Sci. Eng., Vol. 165, p. 18 (2010)] to assimilate experimental data from the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission boiling water reactor full-size fine-mesh bundle test (BFBT) benchmarks to calibrate and reduce systematically and significantly the uncertainties in the predictions of the light water reactor thermal-hydraulic code FLICA4. The BFBT benchmarks were designed by the Nuclear Power Engineering Corporation of Japan for enabling systematic validation of thermal-hydraulic codes by using full-scale experimental data. This work specifically uses BFBT experimental data for the “pump trip for a high-burnup assembly” in the predictive modeling formalism to calibrate parameters and time-dependent boundary conditions (power, mass flow rates, and outlet pressure distributions) in FLICA4, yielding best-estimate predictions of axial void fraction distributions. The resulting uncertainties for the best-estimate time-dependent model parameters and void fraction response distributions are shown to be smaller than the a priori experimental and computed uncertainties, thus demonstrating the successful use of predictive modeling for the large-scale reactor analysis code FLICA4 using BFBT benchmark-grade experiments.