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Swiss nuclear power and the case for long-term operation
Designed for 40 years but built to last far longer, Switzerland’s nuclear power plants have all entered long-term operation. Yet age alone says little about safety or performance. Through continuous upgrades, strict regulatory oversight, and extensive aging management, the country’s reactors are being prepared for decades of continued operation, in line with international practice.
Yutaka Takeuchi, Yukio Takigawa, Shiho Miyamoto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 128 | Number 2 | November 1999 | Pages 257-275
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A3030
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A methodology for boiling water reactor (BWR) regional stability with a one-point neutron kinetics model is proposed from the higher harmonics viewpoint and is verified with the Ringhals-1 stability benchmark test data. A one-point neutron kinetics model for regional stability analysis is derived from the spatial neutron diffusion equation using the mode decomposition technique. From the derivation, the intermode coupled reactivity coefficient is defined and applied to a frequency-domain BWR stability analysis model. The analysis model traces a unit power perturbation and calculates the open-loop transfer function as the power response to the input perturbation. Combined with the aforementioned reactivity coefficient and the asymmetric shape perturbation that reflects the first azimuthal mode, the first azimuthal mode is excited exclusively without any assumption on the ex-core model. Therefore, the regional stability can be evaluated with a normal recirculation flow model, which is employed for core-wide stability analysis. The methodology is verified with the Ringhals-1 stability benchmark test data, whose stability conditions were widely distributed and suitable for verification. The results show that the proposed methodology is quite appropriate for BWR regional stability analysis.