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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.
Adam R. Kraus, Elia Merzari, Mathieu Martin, Dustin Langewisch, Yassin Hassan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 7 | July 2024 | Pages 1455-1476
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2255463
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Flow circulation and heat removal through shield and reflector assemblies can have major impacts on safety in long transients for sodium fast reactors (SFRs). These transients are typically categorized by reduced flow rates and large-scale organized flow patterns, including potential intra-assembly circulation. Such low-flow cases can provide challenges for experiments because of complications in measuring the flow rates and temperatures with high accuracy in different areas. This consequently also raises the uncertainty of many modeling approaches for these phenomena. In an effort to address some of these issues, high-fidelity large eddy simulations are performed using the highly parallel solver NekRS. A 19-pin configuration of a tight-lattice wire-wrapped hexagonal bundle (pitch-to-diameter ratio = 1.07), representing a prototypical internal configuration of a shield assembly, was investigated. The sodium flow was set at a bundle Reynolds number of 2000, with simulations being performed for modified Richardson numbers of 0.0 (i.e., no buoyancy), 0.01, and 0.04, where mixed-convection effects are anticipated. The flow and temperature fields for these cases are discussed in detail. The high-fidelity data should prove useful as reference data for expanding and improving on various reduced-resolution approaches. A basic framework for combining subchannel and computational fluid dynamics methodologies in SFRs is also presented, with preliminary results from simulations of light water reactor bundles and a discussion of changes that need to be made for potential application to SFRs.