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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.
Kun Lu, Shijun Qin, Zhuang Xu, Yang Zhang, Guang Shen, Zhihong Liu, Chen Liu, Jing Wei, Sumei Liu, Yuntao Song, Jiefeng Wu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 75 | Number 3 | April 2019 | Pages 226-233
Regular Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2018.1555409
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The vacuum vessel (VV), one of the important components for the Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) superconducting magnet tokamak, can provide an ultrahigh vacuum and clean environment for plasma operation. The CFETR VV was preliminarily designed to be a torus with a D-shaped cross section, eight upper vertical ports, eight equatorial ports, and eight lower ports. In order to verify the design and key technologies to be used in the future, a 1/8 VV sector mock-up has been designed and fabricated at the Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (abbreviated ASIPP). In this paper, the mock-up is used to demonstrate thick austenitic stainless steel plate hot forming, welding, cutting, part segment assembly, and other technologies and developments. The design considerations and criteria of the 1/8 sector mock-up are discussed in detail. Based on these considerations, the main design parameters and characteristics of the 1/8 VV sector mock-up are described, including the inner shells, outer shells, and stiffening ribs between them and the straight line, arcs, and the tangential joint between them. Finally, the research and development of technologies for the mock-up manufacture that has been carried out at ASIPP is discussed.