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Swiss nuclear power and the case for long-term operation
Designed for 40 years but built to last far longer, Switzerland’s nuclear power plants have all entered long-term operation. Yet age alone says little about safety or performance. Through continuous upgrades, strict regulatory oversight, and extensive aging management, the country’s reactors are being prepared for decades of continued operation, in line with international practice.
Dingkang Zhang, Farzad Rahnema
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 3 | March 2024 | Pages 565-577
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2196935
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, the novel continuous-energy coarse mesh transport (COMET) method is extended to perform time-dependent neutronics calculations in highly heterogeneous reactor core problems. In this method, the time-dependent transport equation is converted into a series of steady-state transport equations by estimating the time derivative term using implicit finite differencing. The resulting steady-state transport equations, having additional terms that are imbedded in the total collision term and in the volumetric source terms, are then solved by the steady-state COMET method, in which all the phase-space variables, including energy, are treated continuously. Finally, the fission density distribution constructed by the steady-state COMET is used to solve a set of ordinary differential equations to obtain the delayed neutron precursor concentrations. The time-dependent COMET method is benchmarked against a direct continuous-energy Monte Carlo method (i.e., MCNP) in a set of infinite homogeneous problems and a set of single-assembly benchmark problems consisting of identical pin cells. It is found that the COMET results agree very well with the Monte Carlo reference solutions while maintaining its formidable computational speed (orders of magnitude faster than the Monte Carlo method).