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National labs drive nuclear innovations and uprates for the U.S. fleet
As the United States faces surging electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence, data centers, and a push to bring manufacturing back home, Idaho National Laboratory is leading an effort to modernize and expand the nation’s nuclear power capabilities by revamping the Department of Energy’s Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program.
Xinyu Zhao, Eugene Shwageraus (Univ of Cambridge)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 198-205
GeN-FOAM is a multi-physics solver based on the OpenFOAM library developed at PSI/EPFL, Switzerland for transient analyses of fast reactors. The current version of GeN-FOAM can simulate a wide range of transients with flexible spatial resolution. One of the main limitations of the current version, however, is relatively simple fuel temperature calculation model. Also, the effects of fuel structural and dimensional changes as a function of temperature, composition and burnup are currently not considered. This work first presents the integration of an advanced fuel performance modelling tool TRANSURANUS developed at Joint Research Centre (JRC)-Karlsruhe into the GeN-Foam solver. The new coupled tool is referred to as the GeN-transFoam. The original GeN-Foam doesn't have burnup calculation capability which makes it very inconvenient to simulate a reactor at the end of cycle, especially when an accurate fuel behaviour prediction is expected. The paper reports a simple way to implement the burnup calculation, given the configuration of the GeN-Foam solver. The GeNtransFoam solver with account for burnup effects is used to analysis the European Sodium Fast Reactor (ESFR) at the end of cycle (EOC) in steady state condition. The neutronics calculation results are compared with results provided by Monte Carlo calculation. In the end, the burnup calculation in the code is discussed.