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DOE launches UPRISE to boost nuclear capacity
The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy has launched a new initiative to meet the government’s goal of increasing U.S. nuclear energy capacity by boosting the power output of existing nuclear reactors through uprates and restarts and by completing stalled reactor projects.
UPRISE, the Utility Power Reactor Incremental Scaling Effort, managed by Idaho National Laboratory, is to “deliver immediate results that will accelerate nuclear power growth and foster innovation to address the nation’s urgent energy needs,” DOE-NE said in its announcement.
David Blanchet, Bruno Fontaine
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 177 | Number 3 | July 2014 | Pages 260-274
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-59
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The current design studies on sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFRs) are breaking with the past since they are guided by a new set of design criteria arising from the objectives of Generation IV reactors. The new safety requirements lead to designing reactors with breakeven breeding cores because in terms of reactivity control, they minimize the need to limit the consequences of an inadvertent control rod withdrawal event. Furthermore, as the reactivity control needs are low, a breakeven core enables the use of absorbing materials with reduced efficiency (natural boron, hafnium, etc.), which may be less costly than enriched boron. However, control rods designed with low absorbing materials may present the disadvantage of a nonnegligible loss of efficiency due to their consumption under irradiation. This paper presents a methodology to accurately calculate and to analyze the impact of this consumption on reactivity control.