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North American construction is back—smaller and faster—at OPG’s Darlington
“The nuclear renaissance is real here,” said Ontario Power Generation’s Subo Sinnathamby on May 8, one year to the day after OPG secured a final investment decision to build the first of four planned BWRX-300 reactors at its Darlington nuclear power plant, and shortly after the new reactor’s foundation was lifted into place. “We got our license to construct in April and our [final investment decision] in May, and we’ve been off to the races since.”
Dennis L. Youchison, Radmir N. Guiniatouline, Robert D. Watson, Jimmie M. McDonald, David S. Walsh, V. I. Beloturov, Igor V. Mazul, Andrey P. Zakharov, Bernice E. Mills, Dale R. Boehme, Vladislav Ilich Savenko
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 29 | Number 4 | July 1996 | Pages 599-614
Technical Paper | Divertor System | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A30701
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Thermal response and thermal fatigue tests of four 5-mm-thick beryllium tiles on a Russian Federation International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)-relevant divertor mock-up were completed on the electron beam test system at Sandia National Laboratories. The beryllium tiles were diffusion bonded onto an oxygen-free high-conductivity copper saddle-block and a dispersion-strengthened copper alloy tube containing a copper porous coating. Thermal response tests were performed on the tiles to an absorbed heat flux of 5 MW/m2 and surface temperatures near 300°C using 1.4 MPa water at 5 m/s flow velocity and an inlet temperature of 8 to 15°C. One tile was exposed to incrementally increasing heat fluxes up to 9.5 MW/m2 and surface temperatures up to 690°C before debonding at 10 MW/m2. A second tile debonded in 25 to 30 cycles at <0.5 MW/m2. However, a third tile debonded after 9200 thermal fatigue cycles at 5 MW/m2, while another debonded after 6800 cycles. Posttest surface analysis indicated that fatigue failure occurred in the intermetallic layers between the beryllium and copper. No fatigue cracking of the bulk beryllium was observed. It appears that microcracks growing at the diffusion bond produced the observed gradual temperature increases during thermal cycling. These experiments indicate that diffusion-bonded beryllium tiles can survive several thousand thermal cycles under ITER-relevant conditions. However, the reliability of the diffusion-bonded joint remains a serious issue.