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Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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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.
T. O. Sauar
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 46 | Number 2 | November 1971 | Pages 274-283
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE71-A22361
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The evolution of a systematic procedure for fuel cycle optimization and a new approach using a linear program for optimal fuel allocation is presented. The process of loading, operating, and refueling a power reactor is viewed as a multistage decision process where each stage or cycle corresponds to a partial refueling of the core and the subsequent operating period, and the objective to be minimized is unit fuel cost. In the overall optimization procedure, k∞ is the state variable of the process and the power control problem is separated from the optimization process. Hence, precalculated results can be used in relating the attainable exposure distribution in a cycle and the resulting power distribution to the k∞ distribution at end of cycle. Interactive graphics have considerable merit in searching for feasible k∞ distributions. Dynamic programming has been applied to this process for certain limited loading schemes. The complexity of the decision vector with a general fuel location matrix led to abandonment of this approach and development of a linear program for optimal fuel allocation. The linear program selects reloading patterns for a few-region core model which minimize the present worth weighted total fuel cost, subject to the constraints of required region fuel loading and k∞ for each stage. It is sufficiently fast to be used as a subroutine in a systematic search for the global optimum of the remaining parameters of the decision vector, such as cycle period, region exposure, region k∞, and fuel enrichment. An iterative overall fuel cycle optimization procedure is outlined where coefficients of the reactor model in the linear program are modified by the results from higher level burnup programs.