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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.
Evgueny P. Shabalin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 99 | Number 3 | September 1992 | Pages 280-288
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT92-A34712
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Physicists dealing with conventional reactor dynamics recognize two types of instability and reactor behavior beyond the stability region: asymptotic excur sions and nonlinear periodic oscillations. A periodically pulsed reactor (PPR) has another peculiar instability: Under certain conditions, its power tends to oscillate at a frequency just twice less than the reactor pulsation frequency. The PPR dynamics far beyond the stability region are analyzed by using a discrete nonlinear model. A PPR with a negative temperature reactivity effect inevitably shows the chaotic power pulse energy behavior known as “deterministic chaos.” The way by which a reactor goes to chaos is defined by the time de pendence of the feedback and by the kind of dynamics model used. The most usual case is a Feigenbaum transition in which the PPR passes through an infinite cascade of oscillation period doubling before chaotic motion appears. The transition of PPR to random behavior through the Feigenbaum scenario must be considered to be “safe.”