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Diversification and the common ground
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
Who would have thought, just a few years ago, that we would see so many long-standing barriers to new nuclear development falling like dominoes? Public opinion, policy, regulatory reform, finance and investment, design maturity, nuclear fuel enrichment, and fuel fabrication capacity have all advanced with remarkable speed in the United States.
Conventional wisdom holds that the most effective way to scale up the nuclear supply chain is to do so strategically, matching investments to the needs of reactor developers.
Aaron J. Reynolds, Todd S. Palmer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 1 | January 2023 | Pages 45-73
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2097565
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We use the deterministic neutron transport code QuasiMolto to simulate steady-state operation of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). Comparisons are made to similar results from the MOST benchmark, the MOOSE-based code Moltres, and the design calculations for the MSRE. In the course of these comparisons, we calculate a value of 0.1799 for the graphite-to-fuel power density ratio, which differs significantly from that seen in other works. We also find uniform graphite heating inadequate to reproduce the characteristic graphite temperature distribution of the MSRE. Leveraging the multilevel projective methodology of QuasiMolto, the influence of transport effects on the modeled problem is found to produce average and maximum group flux variations of 2% to 5% and 30%, respectively, with a 12% variation in the reactivity loss due to delayed neutron precursor drift.