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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.
Ser Gi Hong, Nam Zin Cho
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 132 | Number 1 | May 1999 | Pages 65-77
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-A2049
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new transport theory method of characteristic direction probabilities (CDP), which can treat complicated geometries with computational efficiency, is presented. In the method, the entire problem is divided into subsystems or cells that are further subdivided into finer mesh regions (i.e., computational meshes). Within a subsystem or cell, the fine meshes are coupled by the directional transmission and collision probabilities for each characteristic direction. In other words, all fine meshes in a subsystem are not coupled together but only the fine meshes along the characteristic line are coupled for each direction. This is in contrast to the traditional collision probability methods (CPMs). To calculate the directional probabilities, ray tracing with the macroband concept is performed only on each subsystem type. To couple the subsystems, the angular flux (not the current as in the interface current method) on the interface between the adjacent subsystems is used. Therefore, the method combines the most desirable features of the discrete ordinates methods and those of the integral transport methods. To verify CDP, it is applied to two benchmark problems that consist of complex meshes and is compared with other methods (CPM, method of characteristics, and Monte Carlo method). The results show that CDP gives accurate results with short computing time.