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Long-term strategy calls for up to 10 new reactors in Canada
Canada has launched a Nuclear Energy Strategy, a long-term vision of its nuclear power potential that includes plans to deploy up to 10 new large-scale reactors in the country by 2040.
The June 22 announcement, along with ongoing projects at Darlington and Bruce Power, further confirm Canada's ambitions to expand its nuclear power presence not just domestically but also abroad. Four pillars stand at the heart of the country’s Nuclear Energy Strategy: new nuclear builds in Canada, maintaining its status as a top nuclear supplier and exporter, expanding uranium production, and continuing nuclear fission and fusion innovations.
Andy Rivas, Gregory Kyriakos Delipei, Jason Hou
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 3 | March 2025 | Pages 358-387
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2372515
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Advanced reactor designers are looking to maximize the system capacity factor to make advanced reactors more economically competitive and meet the projected energy demand. To achieve this goal, we propose a Dynamic Operation and Maintenance Optimization (DyOMO) framework to perform system-level predictive maintenance (PdM) using a dynamic Bayesian network and component-specific PdM using deep neural networks. At the system level, DyOMO detects the presence of anomalous phenomena, determines the most influential degradation mode, and estimates the remaining useful life (RUL) distribution for the system. At the component level, DyOMO summarizes the health state of key system components, determines the presence of an anomaly using a feedforward neural network, and predicts component RUL using a Bayesian neural network. To evaluate the overall performance of DyOMO, normal operations of a Pebble-Bed High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (PB-HTGR) were simulated with realistic component degradation for the steam turbine and steam generator. Across the 20 independent reactor life simulations, it was found that maintenance was always performed before any safety limits were violated and before a component failed. Specifically, the system-level PdM suggested maintenance on the steam generator once the steam pressure approached its safety limit, and the component-specific PdM suggested maintenance on the steam turbine once the turbine blade hardness degraded. The results indicate that through the continuous monitoring of the system and individual components, the DyOMO framework improves safety and increases the availability of the reactor when compared to traditional maintenance philosophies.