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2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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Education and training to support Canadian nuclear workforce development
Along with several other nations, Canada has committed to net-zero emissions by 2050. Part of this plan is tripling nuclear generating capacity. As of 2025, the country has four operating nuclear generating stations with a total of 17 reactors, 16 of which are in the province of Ontario. The Independent Electricity System Operator has recommended that an additional 17,800 MWe of nuclear power be added to Ontario’s grid.
Joseph R. Burns, David Chandler (ORNL), Bojan Petrovic (Georgia Tech), Kurt A. Terrani (ORNL)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 738-745
The application of advanced manufacturing to the fabrication of control elements (CEs) for the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) is under investigation at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Advanced manufacturing yields a unique CE design with lumped neutron absorbers, necessitating investigation of the neutronic implications of employing this novel CE design in HFIR. This work assesses the operational performance of advanced manufactured CEs in HFIR throughout their useful lifetime. CE depletion calculations are carried out for long residence time (50 cycles) under several predictor-corrector approximation schemes of varying rigor, with their reactivity worth evaluated at beginning, middle, and end of life. While coarse temporal divisions of the long CE irradiation time yield prominent discrepancies in the isotopic content predicted by each approximation, the corresponding reactivity worth predictions are reasonably consistent across approximations. Further, regardless of the approximation employed, the reactivity worth of the advanced manufactured CEs is found to be comparable to that of the original CEs throughout their useful lifetime. The core power distribution is also not prohibitively perturbed by the introduction of the new CE design at any time in the CE life. Pending irradiation characterization testing, it may thus be concluded that the advanced manufactured CE design can successfully replace the current design and is neutronically feasible for the operation of HFIR.