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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.
Valeria Raffuzzi, Eugene Shwageraus, Lee Morgan, Paul Cosgrove
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 3 | March 2023 | Pages 364-380
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2107262
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel source convergence acceleration method for Monte Carlo eigenvalue calculations is proposed in this paper. The method consists of simulating the bulk of the inactive cycles with online-generated multigroup cross sections. Then the active cycles are simulated with continuous-energy cross sections to preserve full fidelity. The method was implemented in the Monte Carlo code SCONE and tested on several three-dimensional full-length assembly models. In some cases, the same multigroup cross sections were used for several spatially separated materials in order to limit statistical uncertainties. The method was shown to accelerate calculations by a factor of 2.5 to 5 at the cost of a slightly increased standard deviation in the flux distribution estimated across several independent simulations. The memory usage due to storing multigroup cross sections does not seem to be prohibitive for practical applications.