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Deploying nuclear power: Financing, risk, and execution in the current market environment
Nielson
The renewed global interest in nuclear power is often framed as a policy story driven by decarbonization goals, energy security concerns, and surging electricity demand from digital infrastructure and electrification. While these forces are real and durable, they materially understate the challenge at hand. The practical constraint on nuclear deployment today is not strategic will, but execution. Specifically, the challenge lies in how nuclear projects are financed, how risk is allocated, and how investors assess credibility in a sector defined by long timelines and asymmetric downside risk.
Richard L. Williamson, Jason D. Hales, Stephen R. Novascone, Giovanni Pastore, Kyle A. Gamble, Benjamin W. Spencer, Wen Jiang, Stephanie A. Pitts, Albert Casagranda, Daniel Schwen, Adam X. Zabriskie, Aysenur Toptan, Russell Gardner, Christoper Matthews, Wenfeng Liu, Hailong Chen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 7 | July 2021 | Pages 954-980
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1836940
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
BISON is a nuclear fuel performance application built using the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) finite element library. One of its major goals is to have a great amount of flexibility in how it is used, including in the types of fuel it can analyze, the geometry of the fuel being modeled, the modeling approach employed, and the dimensionality and size of the models. Fuel forms that can be modeled include standard light water reactor fuel, emerging light water reactor fuels, tri-structural isotropic fuel particles, and metallic fuels. BISON is a platform for research in nuclear fuel performance modeling while simultaneously serving as a tool for the analysis of nuclear fuel designs. Recent research in BISON includes techniques such as the extended finite element method for fuel cracking, exploration of high-burnup light water reactor fuel behavior, swelling behavior of metallic fuels, and central void formation in mixed-oxide fuel. BISON includes integrated documentation for each of its capabilities, follows rigorous software quality assurance procedures, and has a growing set of rigorous verification and validation tests.