One of the challenges in operating nuclear power plants is to decide the amount of fuel needed in a cycle. Large-scale nuclear power plants are designed to operate at base load, meaning that they are expected to always operate at full power. Economically, a nuclear power plant should burn enough fuel to maintain criticality until the end of a cycle (EOC). If the reactor goes subcritical before the end of a cycle, it may result in early coastdown as the fuel in the core is already depleted. On contrary, if the reactor still has significant excess reactivity by the end of a cycle, the remaining fuels will remain unused. In both cases, the plant may lose a significant amount of money. This work proposes an innovative method based on a data-driven deep learning model to estimate the excess criticality of a boiling water reactor.
@article{arxiv.2411.07425,
title = {Predicting BWR Criticality with Data-Driven Machine Learning Model},
author = {Muhammad Rizki Oktavian and Anirudh Tunga and Jonathan Nistor and James Tusar and J. Thomas Gruenwald and Yunlin Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.07425},
year = {2024}
}