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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.
S. V. Bechta, V. S. Granovsky, V. B. Khabensky, E. V. Krushinov, S. A. Vitol, A. A. Sulatsky, V. V. Gusarov, V. I. Almiashev, D. B. Lopukh, D. Bottomley, M. Fischer, P. Piluso, A. Miassoedov, W. Tromm, E. Altstadt, F. Fichot, O. Kymalainen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 170 | Number 1 | April 2010 | Pages 210-218
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 2008 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants / Materials for Nuclear Systems | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9459
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In case of in-vessel corium retention during a severe accident in a light water reactor, weakening of the vessel wall and deterioration of the vessel steel properties can be caused both by the melting of the steel and by its physicochemical interaction with corium. The interaction behavior has been studied in medium-scale experiments with prototypic corium. The experiments yielded data for the steel corrosion rate during interaction with UO2+X-ZrO2-FeOy melt in air and steam at different steel surface temperatures and heat fluxes from the corium to the steel. It has been observed that the corrosion rates in air and steam atmosphere are almost the same. Further, if the temperature at the interface increases beyond a certain level, corrosion intensifies. This is explained by the formation of liquid phases in the interaction zone. The available experimental data have been used to develop a correlation for the corrosion rate as a function of temperature and heat flux.
