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NRC approves TerraPower construction permit
Today, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it has approved TerraPower’s construction permit application for Kemmerer Unit 1, the company’s first deployment of Natrium, its flagship sodium fast reactor.
This approval is a significant milestone on three fronts. For TerraPower, it represents another step forward in demonstrating its technology. For the Department of Energy, it reflects progress (despite delays) for the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP). For the NRC, it is the first approval granted to a commercial reactor in nearly a decade—and the first approval of a commercial non–light water reactor in more than 40 years.
Yu Weng, Fangfang Cao, Xiaobing Tuo, Hongfang Gu, Haijun Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 190 | Number 1 | April 2018 | Pages 93-104
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1417345
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a 1250-MW pressurized water reactor (PWR), coolant is injected into the reactor vessel under accident conditions through the method of direct injection, which is the most important function of the emergency core cooling system. Since the problem has been found that safety injection start-up will have a significant thermal effect on the reactor’s internal system, a confirmatory study of an improved structure is required in the initial design stage. In this paper, the heat transfer and flow characteristics of the core barrel, the neutron shielding panels, and the radiation surveillance capsules are investigated by a scaled experiment combined with a numerical method to obtain the distribution of the wall temperature and the convective heat transfer coefficient on the outer wall of the reactor internals under different injection conditions. In addition, potentially dangerous parts have been pointed out, and dimensionless correlations are fitted to describe the heat transfer laws of key parts of reactor internals for use in reactor design. This research fills in the gaps in the study of heat transfer under direct injection of the reactor internals in a PWR, providing support for the safety of the reactor structure.