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2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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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.
Dean Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 1 | January 2021 | Pages 1-12
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1785190
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present the new iterative method lpCMFD-SOR, which combines the linear prolongation coarse-mesh finite difference (lpCMFD) scheme with the method of successive overrelaxation (SOR) for neutron transport source iteration (SI). The lpCMFD method is the latest coarse-mesh finite difference (CMFD)–type acceleration scheme and is unconditionally stable and more effective than the standard CMFD method. The SOR method is a variant of the Gauss-Seidel method for solving a linear system of equations, resulting in faster convergence. The idea is to update the scattering source with overrelaxation to speed up the coupled transport-diffusion SI. Fourier analysis shows that the lpCMFD-SOR method converges for a relaxation parameter in the range of . It becomes less effective when underrelaxed (i.e., ) and increasingly more effective as increases above 1 until reaching the optimal overrelaxation value, which is, however, problem dependent. The optimal overrelaxation parameter increases with both the scattering ratio and the optical thickness of the problem. Numerical experiments have confirmed the Fourier analysis results. In general, the SOR method can further enhance the convergence rate of the lpCMFD method by more than 40% for neutron transport problems.