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Westinghouse submits AP1000 design revision to NRC
Yesterday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it has received an application from Westinghouse to renew and update the design certification (DC) for its AP1000 reactor. This application seeks to formally incorporate the lessons learned from the construction of Vogtle-3 and -4 into the design control document (DCD) of the AP1000.
This long-expected submittal builds on previous plans at both the NRC and Westinghouse for the future of gigawatt-scale light water reactor deployments in the United States.
A. A. Haasz, J. W. Davis
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 1 | July 2006 | Pages 58-67
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1220
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Both physical sputtering and chemical erosion take place in tokamaks. Physical sputtering occurs for all elements for incident particle energies greater than an energy threshold. For carbon targets the threshold difference for the three hydrogen isotopes is relatively small. In the energy range of 100 to 3000 eV, the physical sputtering yields are similar for D and T, and the H yields are lower by about a factor of 2 to 3. Chemical erosion studies of graphite due to H+ and D+ impact also show evidence of some isotopic effect - with the deuterium yield being larger. The isotopic yield ratios (D-yield/H-yield) observed in almost all of the chemical erosion measurements, including ion beams, laboratory plasma devices, and tokamaks, lie between 1 and 2. The recently measured chemical erosion yields due to tritium ions also fall in this range. (The notable exceptions are the mass-loss studies at the Max-Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik in Garching, Germany, where for energies <100 eV, the isotopic yield ratio was seen to increase from 4 to 7 with decreasing energy.) A nominal value of 1.5 ± 0.5 is suggested as the most appropriate value for the D/H yield ratio. This is fully consistent with the square root of mass dependence proposed for the modeling of chemical erosion.