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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
K. N. Schwinkendorf
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 121 | Number 1 | September 1995 | Pages 136-141
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A24135
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Large computer codes have been created in the past to predict the energy release in hypothetical core disruptive accidents (CDA) postulated to occur in liquid-metal reactors (LMRs). These codes, such as SIMMER, are highly specific to LMR designs. More recent attention has focused on thermal-spectrum criticality accidents such as for fuel storage basins and waste tanks containing fissile material. This paper presents results from recent one-dimensional kinetics simulations, performed for a recriticality accident in a thermal spectrum. Reactivity insertion rates generally are smaller than in LMR CDAs, and the energetics generally are more benign. Parametric variation of input was performed, including reactivity insertion and initial temperature.