A method is for controlling a nuclear power plant comprising a pressurized water nuclear reactor. The method includes determining that an obtained waiting period and/or a remaining waiting period is greater than a first predetermined time allowing raising of a Xenon concentration to maximal value. The method further includes, responsive to the determination, moving one or more control rods out of the reactor core for compensating the reactivity loss due to an increase of the Xenon concentration, and moving the one or more control rods into the reactor core to a control rod setpoint for the start of power ramp up before the end of the obtained waiting period and/or remaining waiting period.

A method of determination of a nuclear core loading pattern defining the disposition of fuel assemblies. The method includes defining at least one potential core loading pattern and calculating predictive bowing of the fuel assemblies at the end of the operation cycle for each potential core loading pattern. The calculation is carried out by an automatic learning algorithm trained on a training data set that includes a plurality of other core loading patterns. The set also includes, for each of the other core loading patterns, measurements of bowing of fuel assemblies at the end of operation cycle. The method also includes evaluating the at least one potential core loading pattern based on the predictive bowing calculations and at least one predetermined criteria. The method further includes selecting one of the potential core loading patterns based at least in part on the evaluating.

An exemplary system and method provide nuclear reactors with optimized detector placement. The exemplary system and method include a nuclear reactor model, Markov decision process, and reward function, where reinforcement learning can be used to iteratively generate placements of detectors to candidate positions within the nuclear reactor.

Provided is a three-dimensional thermal-hydraulic analysis method and system for a reactor core. The method includes: analyzing a type of a reactor core, dividing an outer-layer mesh and a computational mesh, and establishing a conservative mapping relationship and a set of transport equations; decomposing a coolant viscosity-induced frictional effect, and representing a turbulent mixing-induced exchange of a physical quantity through a source term; establishing a three-dimensional set of governing equations including mass, momentum, and energy conservation equations to describe a flow and heat transfer phenomenon within coolant channels, and forming a fully assembled matrix system based on the set of transport equations; setting a boundary condition and an initial condition for a physical field of the reactor core, and setting an initial field; and iteratively solving the fully assembled matrix system, and obtaining a thermal-hydraulic parameter.