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Fluor to serve as EPC contractor for Centrus’s Piketon plant expansion
The HALEU cascade at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio. (Photo: Centrus Energy)
American Centrifuge Operating, a subsidiary of Centrus Energy Corp., has formed a multiyear strategic collaboration with Fluor Corporation in which Fluor will serve as the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractor for Centrus’s expansion of its uranium enrichment facility in Piketon, Ohio. Fluor will lead the engineering and design aspects of the American Centrifuge Plant’s expansion, manage the supply chain and procurement of key materials and services, oversee construction at the site, and support the commissioning of new capacity.
Akio Yamamoto, Masayuki Toujou, Kentarou Komori, Yasunori Kitamura, Yoshihiro Yamane
Nuclear Technology | Volume 154 | Number 3 | June 2006 | Pages 318-327
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3736
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, new optimization algorithms for the in-core fuel shuffling sequence of a boiling water reactor (BWR) are proposed to reduce outage time. During the short outage of a BWR, fuel shuffling can be a critical path in the periodic overall plant inspection. Therefore, a reduction in operation time for in-core fuel shuffling is essential to improve the plant capacity factor. For BWR in-core fuel shuffling, the shuffling sequence should be selected carefully since a fuel shuffling operation may affect those following it. Furthermore, several constraints must be satisfied during the in-core fuel shuffling of a BWR; e.g., two fuel assemblies must be inserted diagonally in a cell to fix the position of a control blade in it. Therefore, it is difficult to optimize BWR in-core fuel shuffling. In order to resolve this issue, new optimization methods are proposed, and the performances of some optimization algorithms are compared. Test calculations in actual BWR plants reveal that the workload for in-core fuel shuffling can be reduced by the proposed methods. The results of this paper will contribute to increasing the plant capacity factor by reducing the outage time.