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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.
Y. A. Chao, N. Tsoulfanidis
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 121 | Number 2 | October 1995 | Pages 202-209
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A28558
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The conventional transverse integration method of deriving nodal diffusion equations does not satisfactorily apply to hexagonal nodes. The transversely integrated nodal diffusion equation contains nonphysical singular terms, and the features that appear in the nodal equations for rectangular nodes cannot be retained for hexagonal ones. A method is presented that conformally maps a hexagonal node to a rectangular node before the transverse integration is applied so that the resulting nodal equations are formally analogous to the ones for rectangular nodes without the appearance of additional singular terms. Utilizing the invariance of the Laplacian diffusion operator under conformal mappings, it is shown that the diffusion equation for a homogeneous hexagonal node can be transformed to the diffusion equation for an inhomogeneous rectangular node. The inhomogeneity comes in through a smoothly varying mapping scale function, which depends only on the geometry. The steps of conformal mapping from a hexagonal node to a rectangular node are given, and the mapping scale function is derived, evaluated, and applied to nodal equation derivations.