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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.
Yasunori Kitamura, Yuta Eguchi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 3 | November 2014 | Pages 401-413
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-21
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A series of integral reactor physics experiments conducted at the Very High Temperature Reactor Critical Assembly was analyzed to assemble it into a benchmark through an extensive peer-review process under the International Reactor Physics Experiment Evaluation Project. This benchmark provides the experimental data with respect to the criticalities of seven core configurations and the temperature effect on reactivity up to 200°C with explicit experimental uncertainties newly evaluated. It further presents the benchmark models and corresponding values with some simplifications so that it can be used by reactor designers for validating the analytical tools employed to design next-generation reactors and for establishing the safety basis for operation of these reactors.