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NN Asks: What hurdles stand in the way of nuclear power’s global expansion?
Jake Jurewicz
Nuclear technology is mature. It provides firm power at scale with minimal externalities and has done so for decades. The core problem isn’t about the technology—it is how the plants are built. Nuclear construction has a well-documented history of cost and schedule overruns. Previous nuclear plants often spent more than twice what was first budgeted, making nuclear among the power technologies with the largest average cost overruns worldwide.
Recent projects illustrate how severe the problem can be. In South Carolina, the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion saw projected costs rise from roughly $10 billion to more than $25 billion before the project was abandoned in 2017, by which time more than $9 billion had already been spent and customers were stuck paying for a site they have yet to benefit from.
Namjae Choi, Han Gyu Joo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 9 | September 2021 | Pages 954-964
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1887701
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A target velocity sampling method named the Relative Speed Tabulation (RST) is proposed for the efficient treatment of resonance elastic scattering in the Monte Carlo simulation utilizing graphics processing units (GPU). The RST method samples the relative speed between a neutron and a target nucleus by employing pretabulated probabilities of relative speeds. The target velocity is then determined from the sampled relative velocity and the neutron speed. The motivation was to avoid the rejection process of the Doppler Broadening Rejection Correction (DBRC) method, which can incur a significant reduction in the parallel performance of vector processors, such as GPUs, due to its largely varying rejection rates. The RST can also overcome the weakness of large variance of the Weight Correction Method (WCM), which would involve drastic changes in neutron weights. The verification results obtained for the Mosteller benchmark problems demonstrate that the RST is equivalent to the DBRC in accuracy, while the calculation speed remains at the same level of the WCM.