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North American construction is back—smaller and faster—at OPG’s Darlington
“The nuclear renaissance is real here,” said Ontario Power Generation’s Subo Sinnathamby on May 8, one year to the day after OPG secured a final investment decision to build the first of four planned BWRX-300 reactors at its Darlington nuclear power plant, and shortly after the new reactor’s foundation was lifted into place. “We got our license to construct in April and our [final investment decision] in May, and we’ve been off to the races since.”
Thomas J. Downar, Jen-Ying Wu, John Steill, Raghunandan Janardhan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 117 | Number 2 | February 1997 | Pages 133-150
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35320
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-fidelity simulation of nuclear reactor accidents such as the rupture of a main steam line in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) requires three-dimensional core hydrodynamics modeling because of the strong effect channel cross flow has on reactor kinetics. A parallel nested Krylov linear solver was developed and implemented in the RETRAN-03 reactor systems analysis code to make such high-fidelity core modeling practical on engineering workstations. Domain decomposition techniques were also applied to the RETRAN-03 solution algorithm and demonstrated using a distributed memory parallel computer. Applications were performed for a four-loop Westinghouse PWR steam-line-break accident, and performance improvements of over a factor of 30 were achieved for models with 25 flow channels in the core. Larger models (e.g., 104-core channels), previously inaccessible because of memory limitations, were also solved with practical execution times.