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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
In transition: Commercializing fusion power
Commercial fusion power is closer than ever. There are now around 30 U.S. fusion companies, several of which claim to be on track to connect to the grid as early as the 2030s.
Tokamak and laser inertial confinement approaches benefit from decades of research at facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and ITER, with alternative concepts including stellarator, magnetic mirror, and Z-pinch confinement also making notable progress as private and government funding for fusion increases.
Akio Yamamoto, Masahiro Tatsumi, Naoki Sugimura
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 163 | Number 2 | October 2009 | Pages 144-151
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE08-80
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new burnup calculation method, called the projected predictor-corrector (PPC) method, is proposed. In comparison with the conventional predictor-corrector (PC) method, a larger time-step size can be used in burnup calculation without losing calculational accuracy. The PPC method is especially useful for Gd-bearing fuel assemblies, for which a fine time step size is necessary in burnup calculations. The PPC method utilizes a correlation between the number density and the reaction rate in each burnable nuclide and improves the accuracy of the microscopic reaction rate in the corrector step by estimating the “projected” reaction rate. The additional computation time for the PPC method is negligible. Verification calculations are performed for 17 × 17 pressurized water reactor fuel assemblies with 16 Gd-bearing fuel rods. The content of Gd in Gd-bearing fuel rods is set to be 2 to 10 wt%. The calculation results indicate that the PPC method shows comparable accuracy to conventional PC methods whose step time size is about half; i.e., the number of burnup steps in the PPC method can be reduced to about half of that in the conventional PC method.