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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.
Weston M. Stacey, Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 47 | Number 4 | April 1972 | Pages 449-469
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE72-A22436
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper consists of a consistent codification and generalization of previous formalisms and of extensions that result in new approximation methods. The discussion is restricted to the multigroup neutron diffusion equations. The development of variational principles that admit discontinuous trial functions which need satisfy neither the final and initial conditions nor the external boundary conditions of the physical problem is reviewed and generalized. Consistent single-channel and multichannel spatial synthesis and spectral synthesis formalisms are developed. The difficulty with over determined interface conditions which has arisen in previous work is traced to a failure to properly apply continuity requirements at these interfaces so as to relate variations in the adjoint trial functions on opposite sides of the interface. A generalized nodal formalism is developed as an extension of the variational synthesis method. The use of a particular type of piecewise cubic polynomial to modulate expansion functions is introduced as a means to obtain overlapping multichannel synthesis and generalized nodal approximations which do not require the evaluation of troublesome surface integrals. A brief review of the experience to date with variational synthesis methods for the multigroup neutron diffusion equations is given.