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The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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Nuclear new build procurement considerations
It may seem counterintuitive, but the best time to enhance the ability to support operations and maintenance for a new plant is before construction starts. This is one of many lessons learned by the currently operating nuclear fleet. As construction and startup of many nuclear facilities was completed, it quickly became evident that the ability to efficiently support operations and maintenance was limited. Most of the information necessary to establish and manage procurement of spare and replacement items, maintenance, and configuration of the facilities was unavailable and had to be gathered on a case-by-case, “on-demand” basis. Absence of necessary information and the associated challenges resulted in the need for staff augmentation and multiyear-long projects to develop equipment bills of material and maintenance programs and to perform technical evaluations for the huge quantities of spare and replacement items being requested.
Pietro Mosca, Claude Mounier, Pierre Bellier, Igor Zmijarevic
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 175 | Number 3 | November 2013 | Pages 266-282
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-63
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper shows two ways to improve the accuracy of the transport calculations. These improvements, implemented in the APOLLO2 code, concern the fission source calculation and the self-shielding models. The calculation of the fission source was generalized to fission spectra including an incident neutron energy dependence. The subgroup self-shielding model was updated for a mixture of resonant nuclides. Some tests on fast neutron systems like a critical sphere without reflector, a sodium-cooled cell, and a helium-cooled cell show that the use of four optimized incident macro groups for fission spectra guarantees a correct representation of the fission source.The tests on a critical sphere with a thick steel reflector and on a water-moderated mixed oxide cell prove that the subgroup self-shielding, accounting for the mutual shielding of several resonant nuclides, allows us to improve the accuracy of the neutron transport solution.