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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.
Robert P. Rulko, Edward W. Larsen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 114 | Number 4 | August 1993 | Pages 271-285
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE93-A24040
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Even-order PN theory has historically been viewed as a questionable approximation to transport theory. The main reason is that one obtains an odd number of unknowns and equations; this causes an ambiguity in the prescription of boundary conditions. We derive the one-group planar-geometry P2 equations and associated boundary conditions using a simple, physically motivated variational principle. We also present numerical results comparing P2, P1, and SN calculations. These results demonstrate that for most problems, the P2 equations with variational boundary conditions are considerably more accurate than the P1 equations with either the Marshak or the Federighi-Pomraning boundary conditions (both of which have also been derived variationally). Moreover, because the P2 and P1 equations can be written in diffusion form, the discretized P2 equations require nearly the same computational effort to solve as the discretized P1 equations. Our variational method can easily be extended to higher even-order PN approximations.