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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Kenneth Assogba, Lahbib Bourhrara, Igor Zmijarevic, Grégoire Allaire, Antonio Galia
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1584-1599
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2154546
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The spherical harmonics or PN method is intended to approximate the neutron angular flux by a linear combination of spherical harmonics of degree at most . In this work, the PN method is combined with the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite elements method and yield to a full discretization of the multigroup neutron transport equation. The employed method is able to handle all geometries describing the fuel elements without any simplification nor homogenization. Moreover, the use of the matrix assembly-free method avoids building large sparse matrices, which enables producing high-order solutions in a small computational time and less storage usage. The resulting transport solver, called NYMO, has a wide range of applications; it can be used for a core calculation as well as for a precise 281-group lattice calculation accounting for anisotropic scattering. To assess the accuracy of this numerical scheme, it is applied to a three-dimensional (3-D) reactor core and fuel assembly calculations. These calculations point out that the proposed PN -DG method is capable of producing precise solutions, while the developed solver is able to handle complex 3-D core and assembly geometries.