Principal Investigator Jacopo Buongiorno
Increasing the core power density is an attractive way to improve the economics of current and future nuclear plants. We have developed an innovative fuel assembly design that affords a 20% power density increase in the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) core while maintaining the safety margins of lower power reactors.
The new assembly uses an optimized large square lattice with smaller fuel pins and control rods than traditional BWR assemblies, hence it was named the Large-Assembly Small-Pins concept, or LASP.