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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Chenghui Wan, Wenchang Dong, Lin Guo, Jiahe Bai
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 7 | July 2023 | Pages 1454-1466
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2158704
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The “two-step” scheme based on assembly homogenization is widely applied in simulations for pressurized water reactor (PWR) cores in which the few-group constants of the fuel assembly are generated with the single-assembly simulation. However, the reflective boundary condition adopted in the single-assembly simulation can’t characterize the real environment in the core, especially the strong heterogeneity between the neighboring assemblies. In order to consider the environmental effects on the homogenized few-group constants, a rehomogenization method is proposed. In this method, the heterogeneous neutron spectral of single-assembly model of the reflective boundary condition is corrected with the homogeneous neutron spectral of the real core environment. Through definition and precalculation of the rehomogenization factors for few-group constants during the fuel assembly simulation, corresponding corrected constants can be recomputed during the core simulation to consider the environmental effects. This method has been implemented in our home-developed code Bamboo-C. For method verification, both the heavy reflector PWR EPR1750 and the baffle reflector PWR HPR1000 have been simulated. It can be observed that the biases of the eigenvalues can be notably reduced with the proposed rehomogenization method. The assembly-averaged powers of the peripheral fuel assemblies were also notably reduced, especially for the EPR1750, which indicates that the environmental effects can be appropriately solved with the rehomogenization method.