ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
Latest Magazine Issues
Oct 2024
Jul 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
November 2024
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Keeping up with Kewaunee
In October 2012, Dominion Energy announced it was closing the Kewaunee nuclear power plant, a two-loop 574-MWe pressurized water reactor located about 27 miles southeast of Green Bay, Wis., on the western shore of Lake Michigan. At the time, Dominion said the plant was running well, but that low wholesale electricity prices in the region made it uneconomical to continue operation of the single-unit merchant power plant.
Peiwei Sun, Ji Feng, Xianbao Yuan, Liang Zhao, Furong Liu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 199 | Number 1 | July 2017 | Pages 35-46
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1322396
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Canadian SuperCritical Water-cooled Reactor (SCWR) is a once-through pressure tube–type SCWR under development in Canada. It is a multivariable system with strong cross coupling and a high degree of nonlinearity. The outputs are sensitive to disturbances, and the variations in the thermal parameters should be limited to avoid thermal stress to its components. Therefore, designing an adequate control system is challenging. In this paper, robust multivariable feedback control and feedforward control are proposed to design the control system of the Canadian SCWR. Three uncertainty sources are considered: unmodeled uncertainty, linearization uncertainty, and model reduction uncertainty. These uncertainties are evaluated taking into account all aspects affecting the linear dynamic model used in the robust controller synthesis, and the uncertainty bounds are determined to cover the uncertainties. The robust feedback controller is synthesized using the μ-synthesis approach. The feedforward control is added to the robust feedback control to further improve the control performance. It is obtained through disturbance compensation features for a feedforward controller. The control performance of the hybrid control system is evaluated based on the nonlinear simulation by introducing different setpoint changes. The designed control system can stabilize the Canadian SCWR, and the control performance is satisfactory.