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Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Man Gyun Na
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 138 | Number 3 | July 2001 | Pages 305-314
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-A2216
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A receding horizon control method is applied to the axial power distribution control in a pressurized water reactor. The basic concept of receding horizon control is to solve on-line, at each sampling instant, an optimization problem for a finite future and to implement the first optimal control input as the current control input. Thus, it is a suitable control strategy for time-varying systems. The reactor model used for computer simulations is a two-point xenon oscillation model based on the nonlinear xenon and iodine balance equations and a one-group, one-dimensional, neutron diffusion equation with nonlinear power reactivity feedback that adequately describes axial oscillations and treats the nonlinearities explicitly. The reactor core is axially divided into two regions, and each region has one input and one output and is coupled with the other region. Through numerical simulations, it is shown that the proposed control algorithm exhibits very fast tracking responses due to the step and ramp changes of axial target shape and also works well in a time-varying parameter condition.