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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.
Liujun Pan, Ruihong Wang, Song Jiang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 180 | Number 2 | June 2015 | Pages 199-208
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-73
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We propose a modified method to improve the stability of the Monte Carlo fission matrix acceleration (FM) method. In the existing FM method, the weights of fission neutrons are adjusted by the fundamental-mode eigenvector of the fission matrix, which can be calculated by power iteration (PI). In this paper, the PI procedure to calculate the fundamental-mode eigenvector of the fission matrix in each cycle is called the inner iteration to distinguish it from the Monte Carlo iteration cycles. In our proposed method, the fission source distribution tallied during the Monte Carlo simulation is taken as the initial vector for the inner iteration. The weights of the fission neutrons are not adjusted by the fundamental-mode eigenvector of the fission matrix but by the vector obtained with only a few inner iteration steps. We call the proposed method the Monte Carlo fission matrix acceleration method with limited inner iteration (FM_lii). The FM_lii method possesses the following properties: It is more stable than the existing fission matrix acceleration method, and it preserves considerable acceleration efficiency. Moreover, we analyze the stability property of the proposed method for the case of two weakly coupled fissile arrays. A number of numerical tests for practical large-scale, loosely coupled systems are presented that demonstrate the theoretical analysis and efficiency of our scheme.