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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.
Shanwen Zhang, Yuntao Song, Zhongwei Wang, Xuebing Peng, Jianfeng Zhang, Yongfa Qin, Linlin Tang, Qiang He
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 73 | Number 1 | January 2018 | Pages 43-49
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1368334
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), the largest modular stellarator in the world, is in operation at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. The magnet system of the W7-X consists of 50 nonplanar and 20 planar superconducting coils, which are supported by a massive central support structure. All superconducting coils have been subjected to gravity and electromagnetic force due to the interaction between self-field and the coil current in the test conditions in Saclay, France. Each coil is equipped with a few mechanical sensors. Some of the sensors have indicated considerable deviation from the numerical prediction. The nonplanar coil Type 1 is an example of such deviations. This technical note presents structural analyses performed to verify the numerical modeling by checking the stresses in the measurement points. In order to find the reason from the finite element model, three factors are considered: mesh refinement, increasing the region of mesh refinement, and changing the element supports. The results show that the three factors have no impact on the stresses at the measurement points. Finally, special attention has been paid to the sensors during commissioning of the W7-X, which revealed that lack of information about boundary conditions or temperature fluctuations could be the reason for the original discrepancies.