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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Patrick Behne, Jan Vermaak, Jean Ragusa
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 233-261
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2112901
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents a data-driven, projection-based parametric reduced-order model (ROM) for the neutral particle radiation transport (linear Boltzmann transport) equation. The ROM utilizes the method of snapshots with proper orthogonal decomposition. The novelty of the work is in the detailed proposal to exploit the parametrically affine transport operators to intrusively, yet efficiently, build the reduced transport operators in real time in a matrix-free manner compatible with sweep-based transport solvers. This affine-based ROM is applied to one-dimensional (1-D), two-dimensional (2-D), and 2-D multigroup transport benchmarks and is found to significantly outperform less intrusive ROMs in terms of speed for a desired accuracy level. The ROM has an 18.2 to 89.4 speedup with an error range of 0.0002% to 0.01% for the 1-D benchmark, a 1120× to 4870× speedup with an error range of 0.0009% to 0.01% for the 2-D benchmark, and a 54 600× to 399 800× speedup with an error range of 0.00022% to 0.01% for the multigroup 2-D benchmark. Even higher speedups are expected for three-dimensional multigroup transport problems.
