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Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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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.
Yu Ma, Yahui Wang, Ming Xie
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 11 | November 2019 | Pages 1219-1237
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1620052
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Computational accuracy and resource consumption are two sides of the mesh-based neutron transport calculation, whose balance is a common concern in engineering application. To overcome the inflexibility of the multiblock (MB) refinement technique and the complexity of the adaptive-mesh-refinement (AMR) technique, this paper presents a MB-AMR–based neutron transport lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for the first time, which is a development and in-depth study for the current nonuniform mesh technique. The neutron transport problems are solved using the LBM with finite Boltzmann scheme, and the mesh configuration is adaptively adjusted using the MB-AMR technique. The MB-AMR technique combines the simplicity of the MB technique and the flexibility of the AMR technique and overcomes their shortcomings. By using invariant blocks, the complicated tree structure used in the traditional AMR technique is eliminated. By adjusting the mesh configuration according to the calculation results adaptively, the inflexible of the MB technique is overcome. By using the finite Boltzmann scheme instead of the traditional LBM, the implementation is further simplified and the interface treatment between different blocks can be solved as inner nodes using streaming process. Based on the above advantages and the simplicity of the LBM, the difficulty of the AMR technique in neutron transport calculation has been greatly reduced. To verify the accuracy and flexibility of the proposed MB-AMR–based neutron transport LBM, five benchmark problems are simulated. Results show that the proposed neutron transport LBM can simulate the multigroup transient and steady-state neutron transport problems accurately and that the MB-AMR technique can adaptively adjust the mesh configuration flexibly and simply. This paper may provide some alternative perspectives to realize the nonuniform mesh–based neutron transport solution and a powerful technique for large-scale engineering.