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Division Spotlight
Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
Meeting Spotlight
2024 ANS Winter Conference and Expo
November 17–21, 2024
Orlando, FL|Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld
Standards Program
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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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.
YuGwon Jo, Nam Zin Cho
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 189 | Number 1 | January 2018 | Pages 26-40
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1373517
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the three-dimensional (3-D) continuous-energy whole-core reactor analysis, the partial current–based coarse mesh finite difference (p-CMFD) feedback was applied to the Monte Carlo (MC) k-eigenvalue problem simulation for both inactive and active iterations (cycles). To reduce the stochastic errors in the p-CMFD parameters and their biases due to the ratio-type estimators, the first-in-first-out (FIFO) accumulation scheme was introduced in the MC/p-CMFD procedure. The MC/p-CMFD procedure was tested on a typical pressurized water reactor 3-D continuous-energy whole-core problem while varying the FIFO queue lengths and the results were compared with the conventional power iteration. The Shannon entropy analysis showed that MC/p-CMFD accelerates the convergence of the fission source distributions and mitigates the spatial clustering phenomenon. The real variance analysis also showed that MC/p-CMFD reduces the interiteration correlation, leading to the most real variance reduction in the local MC tallies at the optimum queue length (L = 5). It was also shown that a nontrivial bias was introduced by the p-CMFD feedback, especially for the global tally (keff) with L = 1. However, the bias decreased as the tally bin size became smaller and it was effectively reduced by increasing the queue length (L ≥ 5). In conclusion, the MC/p-CMFD procedure showed promising capability for 3-D continuous-energy whole-core reactor analysis by MC simulation.