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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.
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.