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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.
Yoon Sub Sim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 156 | Number 3 | December 2006 | Pages 289-302
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3792
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a thermal-hydraulic analysis for nuclear application, a one-dimensional analysis is widely used. In the analysis, averaging is required for the calculation of the cell property, and the accuracy of the averaging directly influences the accuracy of a numerical scheme. While the average value depends on the property distribution characteristics in a cell, conventional numerical schemes do not utilize the information. Instead, they rely on the use of a large number of nodes for their accuracy. There are many cases where the use of a large number of nodes is not practically allowed, especially in a transient system analysis, and the calculation results come to suffer from a large truncation error. To overcome the drawbacks of the conventional schemes, a new approach is introduced to reduce the truncation error by utilizing the distribution characteristics in a cell for the required averaging. The new approach places a node point at the boundary of a calculation cell and averaging is achieved from the properties at the inlet and outlet by using weighting factors that are determined from the cell property distribution. By this approach, it was successful to describe more accurately even a transient where the property distribution was stepwise. Steady-state calculation for a once-through steam generator where the feedwater is heated to superheated steam was accurately carried out with only three calculational nodes. The characteristics and achievements of the new approach are described.