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NN Asks: Is the U.S. ready for nuclear construction to accelerate?
Craig Stover
Yes, but . . .
The United States is better positioned today for nuclear construction than it has been in decades. Some of that comes from the experience gained at Vogtle and V.C. Summer. I was part of the team that helped start the V.C. Summer project in 2008, and at that time we were trying to build a nuclear construction workforce from scratch. We learned a lot through that effort, and many of those lessons learned have since been studied, documented, and shared.
The nuclear industry is also benefiting from the wave of investment that started growing around 2020. Over the last five or six years, there has been a serious effort across the country to get ready for new nuclear builds. The U.S. government and the private sector are investing billions of dollars in new nuclear. Much of that work is happening before widespread commercial deployment contracts are signed. This is real, and we need to prepare.
M. R. Hartman, S. T. Keller, S. R. Reese, B. Robinson, J. Stevens, J. E. Matos, W. R. Marcum, T. S. Palmer, B. G. Woods
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 174 | Number 2 | June 2013 | Pages 135-149
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-5
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In support of the conversion of the Oregon State TRIGA Reactor (OSTR) from highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel to low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel, a comprehensive neutronic analysis utilizing MCNP5 was performed on the HEU and LEU core configurations. The initial 1974 HEU core provided an opportunity for verification of the MCNP5 baseline model; all fuel elements in the initial core were congruent in geometry and material composition, having no burnup. In addition, a substantial database of core parameters was documented during the initial HEU core start-up. This verification study examined control rod worth, core excess reactivity, burnup, core power, power per element, temperature coefficient of reactivity, void coefficient of reactivity, moderator coefficient of reactivity, axial and radial power profiles, prompt-neutron lifetime, effective delayed-neutron fraction, power defect, and xenon poisoning.Fuel material composition and core loadings are presented. The excellent comparison between the numerical results and the experimental data of the initial HEU core established an objective, credible baseline model and methodology, which were then extended to the LEU core neutronic analysis. Comparison between the numerically calculated core physics values for the new LEU core and data collected during start-up provided a complete verification that the MCNP5 models developed for both the HEU and LEU cores were representative of the OSTR.
