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New laws offer nuclear industry incentives for existing power plant uprates
This year, the U.S. nuclear industry received a much-needed economic boost that could help preserve operating nuclear power plants and incentivize upgrades that extend their lifespan and power output.
Signed into law in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act offers production tax credits (PTCs) for existing nuclear power plants and either PTCs or investment tax credits (ITCs) for new carbon-free generation. These credits could make power uprates—increasing the maximum power level at which a commercial plant may operate—a much more appealing option for utilities.
G. C. Pomraning, Robert Rulko, Bingjing Su
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 118 | Number 1 | September 1994 | Pages 1-23
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE94-A19018
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It has recently been argued that in planar geometry, P2 theory is more accurate (but no more complex) than P1 (diffusion) theory as an approximation to transport theory. This argument was based upon analytic comparisons as well as results from numerical test problems. On the analytic side, the P2 fundamental decay length is more accurate than the corresponding P1 decay length. One of the purposes of this paper is to show that the P2 expansion is, in fact, the optimal choice taken from a large family of expansions in predicting this decay length. Further, P2 theory exhibits scalar flux discontinuities at material interfaces, which can be considered as accounting for internal transport boundary layers. By contrast, the P1 scalar flux is everywhere continuous. The main purpose of this paper is to present an entire family of diffusion equations that contain flux discontinuities at material interfaces All members of this family predict the exact transport fundamental decay length (the discrete Case eigenvalue). One preferred member of this family is shown to be exceedingly accurate in predicting various transport theory behavior for homogeneous source-free problems. The formalism used to derive these diffusion theories is the variational calculus, including boundary considerations that lead to the diffusive boundary conditions.