Deploying New Facilities

Often in fuel cycle analysis, transition scenarios are considered. These ask questins like: “How does the commissioning and decommissioning of reactors affect electrity production or material transactions?”. Transition analysis will require an institution that can deploy additional facilities at given time steps: the cycamore DeployInst archetype. This is the simplest institution that can deploy new facilities, in which the user simply defines the times at which new agents should be deployed as copies of available prototypes.

In this case, we will keep the current institutions and add another institution that will deploy more facilities over time.

Example: DeployInst

The DeployInst archetype must be added to the <archetypes> block of the input file:

<archetypes>
  ...
  ...
  <spec> <lib>cycamore</lib><name>DeployInst</name> </spec>
</archetypes>

Recall: in Adding a Second Reactor we left a blank spot in between our </institution> and </region> handles. We will now use this to add the institution for DeployInst.

DeployInst takes the form:

where:

• prototype: Ordered list of prototypes to build

• build_times: Time step on which to deploy agents given in prototype list

• n_build: Number of each prototype given in prototype list to build

Activity: Add a New Institution

Using the table below and the DeployInst template above, fill out the commodities template.

Prototype | build_times | n_build
UraniumMine | 1 | 1
FuelFab | 1 | 1
1178MWe BRAIDWOOD-1 | 2 | 1
1000MWe Lightwater-1 | 3 | 1

Using the prototype facilities already created, the new institution should look like the following:

<institution>
  <name>ExampleInstitution</name>
  <config>
    <DeployInst>
      <prototypes>
        <val>UraniumMine</val>
        <val>FuelFab</val>
        <val>1178MWe BRAIDWOOD-1</val>
        <val>1000We Lightwater-1</val>
      </prototypes>

      <build_times>
        <val>1</val>
        <val>1</val>
        <val>2</val>
        <val>3</val>
      </build_times>

      <n_build>
        <val>1</val>
        <val>1</val>
        <val>1</val>
        <val>1</val>
      </n_build>
    </DeployInst>
  </config>
</institution>

The above institution will create 1 UraniumMine and 1 FuelFab facility on time step 1. The next time step will deploy the 1178MWe BRAIDWOOD-1 reactor prototype. And finally, at time step 3, the 1000We Lightwater-1 will be deployed. This institution block goes inside the Region block, with the previously created insitutions blocks.

ExampleInstitution is a placeholder for your institution name, and in this scenario only one of each prototype will be deployed since n_build has a value of 1 for each.

This example is now complete. Save your file as the desired file name (with .xml extension) and run your code through Cyclus. If your simulation runs into errors, sample files can be found here under input_deployinst.xml or ouput_deployinst.sqlite.