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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.
Valeria Raffuzzi, Rufus Neame, Paul Cosgrove
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 200 | Number 1 | March 2026 | Pages S485-S502
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2458958
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Deep penetration radiation shielding problems often use Monte Carlo (MC) augmented with weight windows (WWs) to obtain sufficiently low variances in acceptable run times. In this paper, the random ray (RR) method is proposed as an approach to generating WWs. Compared to deterministic alternatives, it allows for straightforward spatial discretization and continuously samples angular phase space. The methods implemented were tested on two shielding problems, examining global variance reduction (GVR) and source-detector variance reduction. In both cases, the figure of merit of the RR-based methods is at least 50 times higher than analog MC, and in the GVR model, it is comparable to that of MAGIC, a popular fully MC approach to WW generation. The methods implemented are also robust to modeling choices like the source of multigroup cross sections (NJOY or MC), scattering anisotropy, and the order of the RR spatial source representation.