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Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
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.
Ryota Katano, Masao Yamanaka, Cheol Ho Pyeon
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1394-1402
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2019.1624084
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The applicability of the linear combination method is experimentally confirmed through the pulsed neutron source (PNS) experiment. The linear combination method reduces the spatial higher-mode (HM) components in neutron flux distribution and provides one representative value of the measurement of the prompt neutron decay constant by the linear combination of the neutron counts obtained in the PNS experiment. The PNS experiment is conducted at Kyoto University Critical Assembly with deuteron-tritium source, and the neutron counts are measured at multiple detector positions. The experiment results show that the dependency of the prompt neutron decay constant on the masking time is dramatically reduced by the linear combination method compared to the conventional method: The HM components are eliminated not only by temporal decay but also by the linear combination. Through the experiment, the linear combination method can be a candidate for a practical measurement method of the prompt neutron decay constant reducing the spatial HM effects.
