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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 8–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Energy Secretary to speak at the 2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
In less than two weeks, the American Nuclear Society’s second annual conference of the year, the 2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo, will come to Washington, D.C.
Today, ANS is announcing that Energy Secretary Chris Wright will be joining the list of nuclear leaders slated to speak at the conference.
Click here to register for the meeting, which will take place November 9–12 in Washington, D.C., at the Washington Hilton. Be sure to do so before November 7 to take advantage of priority pricing.
R. Ponciroli, Y. Wang, Z. Zhou, A. Botterud, J. Jenkins, R. B. Vilim, F. Ganda
Nuclear Technology | Volume 200 | Number 3 | December 2017 | Pages 189-207
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1388668
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work explores the technical challenges associated with flexible operation for nuclear power plants (NPPs) and evaluates whether a flexible operational mode could improve the profitability of nuclear units by allowing nuclear plant owners/operators to reduce output when prices are low and instead shift capacity to the ancillary services markets. As compared to conventional power plants, NPP flexible operation capabilities are affected by additional physics-induced constraints. Among the most limiting constraints is the negative reactivity insertion following every reactor power drop due to the increased concentration of xenon, a strong neutron poison. In this work, a previously available power system operation model based on mixed-integer linear programming optimization was improved by implementing a dedicated representation of these physics-induced constraints for pressurized water reactors (PWRs). Because the xenon-related constraint involves nonlinear governing dynamics, a dedicated parametric approach was implemented. To evaluate the economic implications of flexible PWR operation, a case study using realistic power system data representative of the southwestern United States was analyzed. The results indicate that flexible operation can increase the revenue of nuclear units while at the same time reducing total electric system operating costs.