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DOE approves Xcimer’s laser fusion power plant design
The Department of Energy has approved Xcimer Energy's Athena fusion power plant preconceptual technical design. With this milestone achieved, the Denver, Colo.-based company is now moving forward with its plans to develop economical laser inertial confinement fusion using two beamlines, gas laser technology, and a molten salt fusion chamber.
The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory demonstrated net energy gain from inertial confinement fusion in 2022 using solid-state glass lasers and 192 beamlines.
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.