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Task force charts growing interest in civilian maritime nuclear applications
Readers of Nuclear News will have heard of historical applications of civilian maritime nuclear power, like the merchant ship NS Savannah and the USS Sturgis floating power plant. With a few exceptions there has been little action in this area for over 50 years, and there are plenty of reasons and opinions as to why, but over the last few years the dramatic increase in interest from the maritime industry and its stakeholders has been undeniable.
Bastien Faure, Pascal Archier, Jean-François Vidal, Laurent Buiron
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 192 | Number 1 | October 2018 | Pages 40-51
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1480190
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fast resolution of the Boltzmann transport equation over a nuclear reactor core presupposes the definition of homogenized and energy-collapsed cross sections. In modern sodium fast reactors that rely on heterogeneous core designs, anisotropy in the neutron propagation cannot be neglected, so three-dimensional (3D) models should be used to efficiently compute those effective cross sections. In this paper, the 2D/1D approximation is carried out to overcome computationally expensive 3D calculations while preserving consistent angular representations of the neutron flux. An iterative procedure is defined to solve the 2D/1D equations and produce coarse group homogenized cross sections that account for 3D transport effects. Accuracy of the algorithm is tested on a realistic model of the ASTRID core showing very good results against Monte Carlo simulations for all neutronic parameters (eigenvalue, sodium void worth, and fission map distribution).