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Fuel loading process begins at Palisades
The Palisades nuclear power plant has drawn closer to restart, as plant staff began the process of loading fuel into the reactor vessel on Sunday morning.
The commencement of fuel loading places the Covert, Mich., facility in Mode 6—or the refueling stage—under the plant’s technical specifications, plant owner and operator Holtec International said in a news release. The Palisades reactor core consists of 204 fuel assemblies that include new fuel and partially used fuel from the plant’s most recent operating cycles. According to Holtec, the fuel loading is being conducted in accordance with plant procedures and technical specifications.
Balazs Molnar, Gabor Tolnai, David Legrady
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 190 | Number 1 | April 2018 | Pages 56-72
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1413876
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel particle tracking framework is introduced in this paper that utilizes null-collisions to sample distance to collision in Monte Carlo particle transport problems. The sampling process is described in the most general form as it covers all of the main developments concerning the Woodcock method (delta tracking). We show that none of the previously suggested modifications are optimal in terms of either variance or efficiency. Variance analysis is provided for a general transport problem along with the estimation of computational cost. Simplified models with analytic solutions are further investigated and propositions for optimal settings are discussed based on the derived equations. A well-known variance reduction technique, exponential transform, is found to be a limiting case of the biased Woodcock tracking method and comparison shows the proposed framework may outperform the exponential transform in real-case scenarios.