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Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
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Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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A series of firsts delivers new Plant Vogtle units
Southern Nuclear was first when no one wanted to be.
The nuclear subsidiary of the century-old utility Southern Company, based in Atlanta, Ga., joined a pack of nuclear companies in the early 2000s—during what was then dubbed a “nuclear renaissance”—bullish on plans for new large nuclear facilities and adding thousands of new carbon-free megawatts to the grid.
In 2008, Southern Nuclear applied for a combined construction and operating license (COL), positioning the company to receive the first such license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2012. Also in 2008, Southern became the first U.S. company to sign an engineering, procurement, and construction contract for a Generation III+ reactor. Southern chose Westinghouse’s AP1000 pressurized water reactor, which was certified by the NRC in December 2011.
Fast forward a dozen years—which saw dozens of setbacks and hundreds of successes—and Southern Nuclear and its stakeholders celebrated the completion of Vogtle Units 3 and 4: the first new commercial nuclear power construction project completed in the U.S. in more than 30 years.
Kashuai Du, Po Hu, Lefu Zhang, Weibo Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 10 | October 2019 | Pages 1129-1146
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1591094
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the passive containment cooling system (PCCS) of an AP1000-type pressurized water reactor nuclear power plant, the air convective heat transfer in the external channel of the containment plays a key role under accident conditions. In this study, the containment external channel is simplified into a large-scale rectangular channel with asymmetric heating, and an experimental and numerical study is conducted to evaluate the air heat transfer characteristics. In addition, the effect of the entry form, which comprises an irregular inlet duct and a pore plate, is considered. First, the results show that heat transfer is enhanced by the entry form, which can be verified by numerical simulation and experiment. Second, when analyzing the air heat transfer characteristics of the actual PCCS annular channel, the Gnielinski correlation is relatively conservative since this correlation hugely underestimates the heat transfer rate of numerical cases in a large-scale rectangular channel with the entry form.
