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OSTP memo guides space nuclear plan
A White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum released on Tuesday guides NASA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense on their roles in deploying near-term space nuclear power.
This follows a series of NASA announcements last month—driven by the executive order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” issued by Trump in December—including an ambitious timeline for establishing a moon base, which would rely on fission surface power (FSP) to survive the long lunar night at the moon’s south pole, and plans for a nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) rocket to be launched in 2028.
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.