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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.
Patrick S. Brantley, Edward W. Larsen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 135 | Number 3 | July 2000 | Pages 199-226
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE00-A2135
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new theoretical tool for analyzing continuous and discretized transport equations is presented. This technique is based on a spatial and angular moment analysis of the analytic transport equation, which yields exact expressions for the "center of mass" and "squared radius of gyration" of the particle distribution. Essentially the same moment analysis is applied to discretized particle transport problems to determine numerical expressions for the center of mass and squared radius of gyration. Because this technique makes no assumption about the optical thickness of the spatial cells or about the amount of absorption in the system, it is applicable to problems that cannot be analyzed by a truncation analysis or an asymptotic diffusion limit analysis. The spatial differencing schemes examined (weighted- diamond, lumped linear discontinuous, and multiple balance) yield a numerically consistent expression for computing the squared radius of gyration plus an error term that depends on the mesh spacing, quadrature constants, and material properties of the system. The numerical results presented suggest that the relative accuracy of spatial differencing schemes for different types of problems can be assessed by comparing the magnitudes of these error terms.