| To maintain the economic viability of nuclear power the industry has begun to emphasize maximizing the efficiency and output of existing nuclear power plants by using longer fuel cycles, stretch power uprates, shorter outage lengths, mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel and more aggressive operating strategies. In order to accommodate these changes, while still satisfying the peaking factor and power envelope requirements necessary to maintain safe operation, more complexity in commercial core designs have been implemented, such as an increase in the number of sub-batches and an increase in the use of both discrete and integral burnable poisons. A consequence of the increased complexity of core designs, as well as the use of MOX fuel, is an increase in the neutronic heterogeneity of the core. Such heterogeneous cores introduce challenges for the current methods that are used for reactor analysis. New methods must be developed to address these deficiencies while still maintaining the computational efficiency of existing reactor analysis methods.;In this thesis, advanced core design methodologies are developed to be able to adequately analyze the highly heterogeneous core designs which are currently in use in commercial power reactors. These methodological improvements are being pursued with the goal of not sacrificing the computational efficiency which core designers require. More specifically, the PSU nodal code NEM is being updated to include an SP3 solution option, an advanced transverse leakage option, and a semi-analytical NEM solution option. |
