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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Latest News
Denver Airport may go nuclear
Colorado’s first nuclear power plant of the 21st century could be built at an unconventional site: the Denver International Airport (DEN).
In its mission to gain energy independence and become the greenest airport in the world, DEN has announced that it will conduct a feasibility study to determine the viability of building a small modular reactor on its 33,500-acre campus.
Forrest Shriver, Cole Gentry, Justin Watson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 6 | June 2021 | Pages 626-647
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1852021
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Traditional light water reactor simulations are usually either high fidelity, requiring hundreds of node-hours, or low fidelity, requiring only seconds to run on a common workstation. In current research, it is desirable to combine the positive aspects of both of these simulation types while minimizing their associated negative costs. Because neural networks have shown significant success when applied to other fields, they could provide a means for combining these two classes of simulation. This paper describes a methodology for designing and training neural networks to predict normalized pin powers and within a reflective two-dimensional pressurized water reactor assembly model. The developed methodology combines computer vision approaches, modular neural network approaches, and hyperparameter optimization methods to intelligently design novel network architectures. This methodology has been used to develop a novel new architecture, LatticeNet, which is capable of predicting pin-resolved powers and at a high level of detail. The results produced by this novel architecture show the successful prediction of the target neutronics parameters under a variety of typical neutronics conditions, and they indicate a potential path forward for neural network–based model development.