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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.
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.