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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
William Bennett, Ryan G. McClarren
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 9 | September 2023 | Pages 2270-2300
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2199783
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The set of benchmark solutions used in the thermal radiative transfer community suffers some coverage gaps, in particular, nonlinear, nonequilibrium problems. Also, there are no nonequilibrium, optically thick benchmarks. These shortcomings motivated the development of a numerical method free from the requirement of linearity and easily able to converge on smooth optically thick problems, i.e., a moving mesh Discontinuous Galerkin framework that utilizes an uncollided source treatment. Having already proven this method on time-dependent scattering transport problems, we present here solutions to nonequilibrium thermal radiative transfer problems for familiar linearized systems together with more physical nonlinear systems in both optically thin and thick regimes, including both the full transport and the / solution. Geometric convergence is observed for smooth sources at all times and some nonsmooth sources at late times when there is local equilibrium. Also, accurate solutions are achieved for step sources when the solution is not smooth.
