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At least 1,315 records · Page 73

Feasibility of Power Ramp Testing in the Advanced Test Reactor

For decades, the Halden Boiling Water Reactor (HBWR) in Norway was an international resource for assessing nuclear fuels and materials behavior and its unexpected shutdown in 2018 represented a significant loss in experimental capability for prototypical irradiation testing. In the aftermath of the closure, a study was performed to assess capability gaps related to the Accident Tolerant Fuels (ATF) program. It was concluded that the primary capability gaps left by the closure of the HBWR were the loss of prototypic in-pile Light Water Reactor (LWR) loops that provide operational transient testing and in-pile Loss-of-Coolant Accident (LOCA) testing capabilities. The study also concluded that the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) and Transient Reactor Test Facility (TREAT) likely have the necessary key capabilities to absorb the breadth of the HBWR mission gaps related to the ATF program, but additional investments in experimental infrastructure were needed. One such investment is the design and installation of additional pressurized water loops in the medium-I positions of the ATR, hereafter referred to as I-Loops, to support power ramp testing and testing in Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) conditions. This paper gives an overview of the planned ATR I-Loops and assesses the feasibility of performing power ramp testing inside such a loop.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Validation of ORIGEN for VVER-440 Spent Fuel with Application to Fork Detector Safeguards Measurements

The US Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) are collaborating with the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority in Finland to assess spent fuel verification methods for potential application to measurements at the planned spent fuel encapsulation plant and geological repository prior to final disposal in Finland. The fork detector (FDET) used to measure the neutron and gamma radiation from a given spent fuel assembly is an existing technology widely used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Euratom for the safeguards verification of spent fuel operator declaration. Recently, an FDET data analysis software, referred to as the ORIGEN module, was developed and incorporated into the IAEA/Euratom Integrated Review and Analysis Program. This module uses the ORIGEN burnup code to calculate the nuclide concentrations and the neutron and gamma source terms in the spent fuel based on operator declarations. Then, to predict the expected FDET signals for a given fuel assembly, the module combines the source terms calculated by ORIGEN with FDET response functions that were pre-generated using MCNP models. The inspector can compare the calculated signals to the measured values in real time to identify possible anomalies in fuel assembly’s operator declaration, integrity, or measurement. In this work, the capability of the ORIGEN module was extended from application to typical light water reactor fuels to use for VVER-440 assembly types. The accuracy of ORIGEN for this type of fuel assembly calculations was assessed by comparing calculated nuclide concentrations against destructive assay measurements for VVER-440 spent fuel. The performance of the ORIGEN module for FDET safeguards verification in routine inspections was assessed using FDET measurement data for 13 spent VVER-440 assemblies that were measured at the Loviisa Nuclear Power Plant in Finland, by comparing the calculated signals to the measured quantities. The results show that the calculated FDET neutron and gamma detector signals are generally within 12% of the measurements except for one assembly. Thus, these results are applicable to future safeguards verification in the planned Finland encapsulation plant, such as for passive neutron albedo reactivity safeguards measurements.

98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL P↗

International review of market trends, technologies and policies for commercial refrigeration equipment and implications for China

This report reviews the latest global and China-specific market trends as well as latest technology and policy trends related to commercial refrigeration equipment, with emphasis on refrigerated display cabinets. Section 2 reviews the global and China market trends for commercial refrigeration equipment. Section 3 presents the latest technology options for improving energy performance and compares global Best Available Technologies (BAT) to regional and China-specific baselines, and discusses low-GWP refrigerant options for commercial refrigeration equipment. Section 4 reviews global energy efficiency standards and labeling programs, and compares international efficiency standard requirements with China’s proposed and existing standard requirements. Section 5 ends with a review of key findings and conclusions.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Development of Transmission Measurements Capability at VISION Spectrometer [Slides]

This presentation covers the development of transmission measurements capability at VISION Spectrometer. Main takeaways include that INS and transmission measurements are and should be the most significant part of TSL validation, as they are the fundamental quantities used by Monte Carlo neutronics codes. Additionally, the development of transmission capability at VISION instrument has commenced. Promising first results have been obtained with a big impact by the use of the collimators. Finally, Areas of improvement have been identified and new measurements are planned for June.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Fall 2023 Solar Industry Update [Slides]

Each quarter, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) conducts the Quarterly Solar Industry Update, a presentation of technical trends within the solar industry. Each presentation focuses on global and U.S. supply and demand, module and system price, investment trends and business models, and updates on U.S. government programs supporting the solar industry. This quarter we also provide additional analysis on the domestic content of U.S. PV installations.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Functional Requirements for the WEIS Toolset to Enable Controls Co-Design of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines

The goal of the new Wind Energy with Integrated Servo-control (WEIS) toolset under development is to provide the offshore wind industry and research communities with an open-source, user-friendly, flexible tool to enable true controls co-design (CCD) of the physical design of a floating offshore wind turbine together with the controller. WEIS will use a multifidelity library of models built on the foundations of WISDEM® and OpenFAST formerly known as FAST). This paper presents the WEIS development plan, including the functional requirements of WEIS (including improvements to WISDEM and OpenFAST) together with associated rationale for their establishment and a qualitative description of the modeling approaches that will be implemented to address these functional requirements. The development of WEIS is a project under the Aerodynamic Turbines Lighter and Afloat with Nautical Technologies and Integrated Servo-control program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy.

27 ARPA - Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy↗

TEAMER: MADWEC Techno-Economic Analysis

The objective of this project was for the facility to conduct a techno-economic assessment (TEA) of the Maximal Asymmetric Drag Wave Energy Converter (MADWEC), developed by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (UMass Dartmouth). MADWEC is used for powering remote monitoring and Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) charging systems compared to other existing power supply options. The assessment estimates capital expenditures (CapEx), operational expenditures (OpEx), and power performance for 18 scenarios with the purpose of identifying key cost drivers, comparing total system cost, and comparing the power performance of the power supply options in terms of required installed capacity and estimated theoretical annual energy performance. The 18 assessed scenarios include two end-uses: 1) AUV charging and 2) offshore remote monitoring); three power sources: 1) MADWEC), 2) photovoltaic (PV) solar buoy, 3) and traditional battery swapping); and three locations; 1) nearshore, 2) far-offshore, and 3) high-latitude). In addition, other project goals included developing high level installation, operation, and maintenance plans for each scenario. The techno-economic model, created in Microsoft Excel, estimates CapEx, OpEx, and the power performance of each power supply source. The model has a dynamic format that allows custom inputs to accommodate future changes to the systems being assessed. This is a TEA for the MADWEC project, TEAMER RFTS 7 (request for technical support) program.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗

Report on High Energy Arcing Fault Experiments

This report documents an experimental program designed to investigate High Energy Arcing Fault (HEAF) phenomena for medium voltage electrical switchgear containing aluminum conductors. This report covers full-scale laboratory experiments using representative nuclear power plant (NPP) three-phase electrical equipment. Electrical, thermal, and pressure data were recorded for each experiment and documented in this report. This report covers four of the fourteen planned medium voltage electrical enclosure experiments. Subsequent reports will document the additional experiments performed in the future. The experiments were performed at KEMA Labs located in Chalfont, Pennsylvania. The experimental design, setup, and execution were completed by staff from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and KEMA. In addition, representatives from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) observed some of the experimental setups and execution. The HEAF experiments were performed on four near-identical units of General Electric metal-clad medium voltage switchgear. The three-phase arcing fault was initiated on the primary cable connection bus. All four experiments used the same system voltage (6.9 kV) but varied the current and duration. Real-time electrical operating conditions, including voltage, current and frequency, were measured during the experiments. Heat fluxes and incident energies were measured with plate thermometers and slug calorimeters at various locations around the electrical enclosures. Internal enclosure pressures were measured during the experiments. The experiments were documented with normal and high-speed videography, infrared imaging, and photography. Insights from the experimental series included timing information related to enclosure breach, event progression, mass loss measurements for electrodes and steel enclosures, peak pressure rise, particle analysis, along with visual and thermal imaging data to better understand and characterize the hazard. These results will be used in subsequent efforts to advance the state of knowledge related to HEAF.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Fuels Irradiation and Physics Database (FIPD) Development and Data Qualification FY24 Updates

The DOE-NE Advanced Reactor Technologies program has supported efforts to recover and preserve metallic fuel data generated throughout the past fast reactor R&D programs. Those efforts are currently focused on establishing databases for information from the experiments conducted during the Integral Fast Reactor program including data generated at EBR-II, FFTF, and TREAT reactors, as well as out of pile transient testing data. These databases are essential for future-licensing activities of metallic fuel based advanced fast reactors. This report describes the Metallic Fuels Irradiation & Physics Database (FIPD) development, content updates, data qualification status, and user support in FY24. Future plans are also provided.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

ARPA-E PERFORM datasets

Time-coincident load, wind, and solar data including actual and probabilistic forecast datasets at 5-min resolution for ERCOT, MISO, NYISO, and SPP. Wind and solar profiles are supplied for existing sites as well as planned sites based on interconnection queue projects as of 2021. For ERCOT actuals are provided for 2017 and 2018 and forecasts for 2018, and for the remaining ISOs actuals are provided for 2018 and 2019 and forecasts for 2019. There datasets were produced by NREL as part of the ARPA-E PERFORM project, an ARPA-E funded program that aim to use time-coincident power and load seeks to develop innovative management systems that represent the relative delivery risk of each asset and balance the collective risk of all assets across the grid. For more information on the datasets and methods used to generate them see https://github.com/PERFORM-Forecasts/documentation.

5-min data↗

Climate Adaptation Approaches for Water and Electric Utilities: A compendium of existing strategies in a changing climate

Report analyzes plans developed by water and electric utilities to address the impacts of changes in the climate within their service territories. The analysis identifies the main types of changes that utilities address, such as sea level rise, extreme heat, and compound events such as freezing rain/show and extreme wind events. It then identifies adaptation approaches utilities have proposed or adopted to address the changes that are anticipated in their service territories. The report also identifies the mechanisms utilities (and in some cases the governments which the utilities are part of) use to ensure that energy or environmental equity is increased as a result of the resilience program. In summary, the report provides a compendium of adaptation strategies that can be used by others as they review their own need to increase climate resilience.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Geolocated dataset of Chinese overseas development finance

China is now the world's largest source of bilateral development finance and will likely continue to play a prominent role in sovereign lending through its multi-billion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative. This paper introduces major methodological enhancements in tracking this finance: the use of an original application programming interface (API) to gathers news in multiple languages; double verification of every record to ensure every finance commitment has been formalized; and visual geo-location to trace the precise footprint of every project. The resulting dataset enables economic, environmental, and social analyses with high-precision spatial accuracy, as well as spatiotemporal monitoring by project stakeholders and enhanced planning by project managers. It covers the years 2008-2019 to enable analysis before and after the announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative. It includes 862 finance commitments, 669 of which have geographic location, to 94 countries across the world.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

A comparative analysis of US state-level policies and programs to advance energy justice

Abstract The US energy system is undergoing massive changes that have environmental, technological, and societal implications. Decisions and actions taken now will dramatically alter the trajectory of our future energy system. Though new technologies can lessen the dangers of anthropogenic climate change, an effective and sustainable transition requires addressing social justice issues as a priority. To this end, many states have implemented policies and programs that address energy justice. A formal survey of state-level energy justice policies and programs is needed to better understand the methods used to assist communities targeted and the impacts of these efforts. Such an analysis should include an analysis of the metrics used to judge the effectiveness of the enacted policies and programs. In this paper, we analyze the energy justice policies and programs of seven different US states. From this analysis, we identify three important aspects of state energy policies. First, most policies and programs do not articulate their goals, nor cite metrics to judge their successes. This lack of transparency and accountability is a major roadblock to truly just solutions. Second, states focus on a very narrow range of solutions for energy justice issues. The most prevalent being utility bill assistance, which does not address the systemic and enduring challenges faced by many low-income or historically marginalized communities. Lastly, comprehensive energy policy does not acknowledge and address housing, employment, education, and healthcare inequities that exacerbate energy system inequities. The work presented in this paper sheds light on the progress of state-level energy justice policies and programs across the United States, and we argue more work needs to be done to understand best practices in energy justice policymaking.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Analysis of parton distributions in a pion with Bézier parametrizations

We explore the role of parametrizations for nonperturbative QCD functions in global analyses, with a specific application to extending a phenomenological analysis of the parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the charged pion realized in the xFitter fitting framework. The parametrization dependence of PDFs in our pion fits substantially enlarges the uncertainties from the experimental sources estimated in the previous analyses. We systematically explore the parametrization dependence by employing a novel technique to automate generation of polynomial parametrizations for PDFs that makes use of Bézier curves. This technique is implemented in a ++ module that is included in the xFitter program. Our analysis reveals that the sea and gluon distributions in the pion are not well disentangled, even when considering measurements in leading-neutron deep inelastic scattering. For example, the pion PDF solutions with a vanishing gluon and large quark sea are still experimentally allowed, which elevates the importance of ongoing lattice and nonperturbative QCD calculations, together with the planned pion scattering experiments, for conclusive studies of the pion structure. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Sparow-Examples

SAND2026-16701O SPAROW-Examples software provides a repository of stochastic programming examples designed to demonstrate Sandia's SPAROW optimization library. This resource helps users learn to develop complex applications with SPAROW by offering reference implementations that can be used to test and enhance new optimization solvers. The library offers a diverse range of simple and complex exemplars, including those related to power grid applications such as unit commitment and expansion planning. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Hart, William [Sandia National Lab. (SNL-CA), Live↗

Digital Engineering Sensor Architectures for Future Microreactor Builds

The development of new nuclear reactors continues to be high risk during the construction phase, with many programs exceeding their budget by 2–3×. This work entails an investigation of sensors that can be utilized during the construction of microreactors and their incorporation into a digital twin supporting the construction process. These sensors can be used to monitor construction progress, inform of variances from the expected design, and verify that the reactor is being built to the planned building information management model. This will ensure reactor equipment and components accurately interact through welding or additive manufacturing technologies. This study illustrates the importance of the digital engineering architecture for microreactor deployment.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Power System Wildfire Risks and Potential Solutions: A Literature Review & Proposed Metric

Several fire risk evaluation, fire tracking, and fire response resources are available. The risk metrics and fire response programs are sometimes modified to include a power system context. The risk metrics often evaluate the risk of fires causing power system faults or outages, especially on transmission systems. The response programs are modified to ensure the safety of power system equipment and first responders as well as to coordinate power system outages to both ensure safety during an active fire and prevent fire ignition during high risk periods. Although some aspects of wildfire responses have been adapted to include power system concerns, adaptations to power system operations and maintenance to include wildfire risks and responses are still nascent. In particular, a risk metric that evaluates the potential for power system components to ignite wildfires is needed to help guide power system upgrade efforts and power system fire safety measures. This document serves as a brief literature review of wildfire risk metrics and response programs and how they relate to power systems. It also includes a proposed risk metric and structure for describing the risk of a power system component igniting a fire.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗