Abstract:

Nuclear power is a crucial component of future energy portfolios for expanding worldwide energy demand in the context of anticipated resource and carbon gas emission constraints. Enhanced resource utilization, efficient management of used nuclear fuel, and reduced proliferation risk have been identified as items that have to be addressed for nuclear power to fulfill its expanding role. Advanced fuel cycles are being explored aiming at achieving these goals, and fast reactors are the critical component of these fuel cycles. This presentation reviews the roles of fast reactors in the advanced fuel cycles and innovative fast reactor design studies to promote the fuel cycle objectives.

Brief Biography:

Dr. Yang is an internationally renowned expert in the areas of nuclear reactor physics and advanced reactor design. His contributions have been employed for a wide variety of fields (ranging from neutronics to thermal and stability analysis) for diverse reactor types (fast reactors with different coolants, gas-cooled very high temperature reactors, heavy water reactors, supercritical water reactors, and accelerator-driven systems). In the area of nuclear reactor physics, he has performed significant and original research in several areas, including depletion perturbation theory methods, fuel cycle sensitivity analysis methods, flux reconstruction and mathematical adjoint calculation methods for hexagonal nodal methods, cross section generation methods for fast reactor analysis, and even-parity transport solution methods for fast reactor applications. He also performed various design and analysis studies: sodium and lead cooled reactor and accelerator-driven system designs, long-lived fission product transmutation study, thermal-hydraulic analyses of the EBR-II reactor, and coupled nuclear thermal-hydraulic stability analysis method development for SCWR. Recently, he directed and coordinated the core design activities for the Small Modular Fast Reactor developed jointly by ANL, CEA and JAEA, and those for the Advanced Burner Reactor as part of the GNEP program of the U.S. DOE. He also provided training courses on the fast reactor analysis codes of ANL to the staff members of GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, Westinghouse and TerraPower. Currently, for the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation program of the U.S. DOE, he is directing the development of the unstructured-geometry deterministic neutron transport code UNIC; the multi-group cross section generation code MC2-3; and the coupled neutronics and thermo-fluid simulation methods for VHTR analysis. He is also directing the collaboration work on the Traveling Wave Reactor with TerraPower, LLC and serving as the U.S. side technical representative for the DOE and JAEA collaboration on the Monju system startup tests.