An Overview of AI Methods for in-Core Fuel Management: Tools for the Automatic Design of Nuclear Reactor Core Configurations for Fuel Reload, (Re)arranging New and Partly Spent Fuel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An important aspect of managing a nuclear reactor is how to design refuellings, and from the 1980s to the present different artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have been applied to this problem. A section of the reactor core resembles a symmetrical grid; long fuel assemblies are inserted there, some of them new, some of them partly spent. Rods of “burnable poisons” dangle above, ready to be inserted into the core, in order to stop the reactor. Traditionally, manual design was made by shuffling positions in the grid heuristically, but AI enabled to automatically generate families of candidate configurations, under safety constraints, as well as in order to optimize combustion, with longer cycles of operation between shutdown periods, thus delaying the end-of-cycle point (except in France, where shutdown is on an annual basis, and Canada, where individual fuel assemblies are replaced, with no need for shutdown for rearranging the entire batch). Rule-based expert systems, the first being FUELCON,1 were succeeded by projects combining neural and rule-based processing (a symbolic-to-neural compilation of rules we did not implement), and later on, genetic algorithms in FUELGEN.2 In the literature, one also comes across the application of fuzzy techniques, tabu search, cellular automata and simulated annealing, as well as particle swarms. Safety regulations require simulating the results using a parameter prediction tool; this is done using either nodal algorithms, or neural processing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".