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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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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!
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Latest News
IAEA again raises global nuclear power projections
Noting recent momentum behind nuclear power, the International Atomic Energy Agency has revised up its projections for the expansion of nuclear power, estimating that global nuclear operational capacity will more than double by 2050—reaching 2.6 times the 2024 level—with small modular reactors expected to play a pivotal role in this high-case scenario.
IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi announced the new projections, contained in the annual report Energy, Electricity, and Nuclear Power Estimates for the Period up to 2050 at the 69th IAEA General Conference in Vienna.
In the report’s high-case scenario, nuclear electrical generating capacity is projected to increase to from 377 GW at the end of 2024 to 992 GW by 2050. In a low-case scenario, capacity rises 50 percent, compared with 2024, to 561 GW. SMRs are projected to account for 24 percent of the new capacity added in the high case and for 5 percent in the low case.
Joseph Oncken, Linyu Lin, Vivek Agarwal
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 12 | December 2024 | Pages 2274-2289
Review Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2342206
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Microreactors, a specific class of nuclear reactor, feature a thermal power output of <20 MW, with intended use cases ranging from power production for remote localities and industrial facilities, to military applications, to disaster relief. Because the remote locations of these reactors make repairs difficult, and with continuous power production being essential for the intended use cases, the control system for microreactors should be able to operate or safely shut down the reactor under abnormal conditions (e.g. cases of component failure). The nuclear industry is currently pursuing various microreactor designs, one of which is the heat pipe (HP)–cooled microreactor. A potential failure mechanism in this type of microreactor is individual HP failure. The present work explores the notion that even if a single HP fails, an HP-cooled microreactor may still be controllable in its degraded state. A framework is presented for the stable control of an HP-cooled microreactor system’s thermal output power and temperature regulation under both normal and HP failure conditions, using adaptive model predictive control (A-MPC). A-MPC was implemented for its ability to maintain optimal controller performance under changing plant state and system constraints. The complex, nonlinear physical phenomena present in an HP-cooled microreactor make using a physics-based model as the A-MPC controller’s internal predictor impractical. Thus, a data-based surrogate predictor model was developed for use under both normal and HP failure conditions.
The subject under study is a 37-HP system intended to simulate the HP and core thermal behavior of an HP-cooled microreactor. This system was modeled and simulated in DireWolf, a Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE)–based application designed to simulate HP-cooled microreactors. The resulting model was used to generate training data for the data-based predictor model and served as the plant simulator when coupled with the A-MPC controller. This paper presents the data-based predictor model of the 37-HP system, the A-MPC controller architecture that proved suitable under both normal and HP failure microreactor conditions, and the performance of the controller when coupled with the DireWolf simulation of the 37-HP system under both normal and HP failure conditions.