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NC State celebrates 70 years of nuclear engineering education
An early picture of the research reactor building on the North Carolina State University campus. The Department of Nuclear Engineering is celebrating the 70th anniversary of its nuclear engineering curriculum in 2020–2021. Photo: North Carolina State University
The Department of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University has spent the 2020–2021 academic year celebrating the 70th anniversary of its becoming the first U.S. university to establish a nuclear engineering curriculum. It started in 1950, when Clifford Beck, then of Oak Ridge, Tenn., obtained support from NC State’s dean of engineering, Harold Lampe, to build the nation’s first university nuclear reactor and, in conjunction, establish an educational curriculum dedicated to nuclear engineering.
The department, host to the 2021 ANS Virtual Student Conference, scheduled for April 8–10, now features 23 tenure/tenure-track faculty and three research faculty members. “What a journey for the first nuclear engineering curriculum in the nation,” said Kostadin Ivanov, professor and department head.
Tsung-Kuang Yeh, Mei-Ya Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 165 | Number 2 | June 2010 | Pages 210-223
Technical Paper | dx.doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-27
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A theoretical model was adapted to evaluate the impact of power coastdown on the water chemistry of two commercial boiling water reactors (BWRs) in this work. In principle, the power density of a nuclear reactor upon a power level decrease would immediately be lowered, followed by water chemistry variations due to reduced radiolysis of water and extended coolant residence times in the core and near-core regions. It is currently a common practice for commercial BWRs to adopt hydrogen water chemistry (HWC) for corrosion mitigation. The optimal feedwater hydrogen concentration may be different after a power coastdown is implemented in a BWR. The computer code DEMACE was used in the current study to investigate the impact of various power coastdown levels on major radiolytic species concentrations and electrochemical corrosion potential (ECP) behavior of components in the primary coolant circuit of two domestic reactors operating under either normal water chemistry or HWC. Our analyses indicated that under a rated core flow rate, the chemical species concentrations and the ECP did not vary monotonically with decreases in reactor power level at a fixed feedwater hydrogen concentration. In particular, ECP variations basically followed the patterns of hydrogen peroxide in the selected regions and exhibited relatively high values at power levels of 95 and 90% for Chinshan Unit 1 and Kuosheng Unit 1, respectively.