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DOE selects first companies for nuclear launch pad
The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy and the National Reactor Innovation Center have announced their first selections for the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad: three companies developing microreactors and one developing fuel supply.
The four companies—Deployable Energy, General Matter, NuCube Energy, and Radiant Industries—were selected from the initial pool of Reactor Pilot Program and Fuel Line Pilot Program applicants, the two precursor programs to the launch pad.
Michael L. Corradini, Warren M. Rohsenow, Neil E. Todreas
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 73 | Number 3 | March 1980 | Pages 242-258
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE80-A19849
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A major portion of the safety analysis effort for the liquid-metal fast breeder reactor is involved in assessing the consequences of a hypothetical core disruptive accident. A postulated loss-of-flow transient without scram may produce a two-phase fuel source at high pressures. The heat transfer process between the fuel and the sodium coolant as it is ejected into the upper plenum is described in this study. One mechanism that can cause the coolant to become entrained in the two-phase fuel is Taylor instabilities. The characteristic size of the entrained coolant droplets is considered to be equal to the critical wavelength of a Taylor instability. Analysis of full-scale reactor conditions indicates that the dominant heat transfer mechanism is radiation. Also, if noncondensible gases are absent, fuel vapor condensation on the sodium coolant droplets is controlled by mass diffusion, hence the subsequent rate of coolant vaporization is small. The net effect of the heat transfer is to reduce the fuel vapor pressure and reduce the expansion work by a factor of 1.2 to 2.5. Small-scale simulant experiments utilizing refrigerants could confirm the fuel condensation/sodium vaporization behavior, while reactor material tests must be done to investigate the radiation heat transfer mechanism.