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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.
H. Y. Yoon, I. K. Park, J. R. Lee, S. J. Lee, Y. J. Cho, S. J. Do, H. K. Cho, J. J. Jeong
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 8 | August-September 2020 | Pages 633-649
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1727698
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A high-fidelity safety analysis method for pressurized water reactors (PWRs) is presented using a multiscale and multiphysics coupled code. Computational resolution of the conventional safety analysis can be greatly improved using this method in which the whole reactor vessel is modeled at a subchannel scale with around 5 million calculation meshes. Three-dimensional thermal hydraulics inside the reactor vessel is simulated using CUPID-RV with subchannel-scale thermal-hydraulic models for the reactor core. The subchannel models were validated using the legacy rod bundle experiments including single- and two-phase flow tests that were used in the validation of other subchannel analysis codes. The three-dimensional mesh was generated for the reactor vessel. Structured meshes were used in the core region for the subchannel model, and body-fitted unstructured meshes were applied for the downcomer, lower and upper plenums, and hot and cold legs. The number of meshes was optimized for a practical calculation. A three-dimensional core kinetics code (MASTER) and a one-dimensional system analysis code (MARS) were coupled with CUPID-RV for an accident analysis of PWRs. Subchannel-scale full-core steam line break accident analysis of the OPR1000 PWR was realized using the coupled code (MASTER/CUPID-RV/MARS) with a reasonable computation time, and thus, the present method can be used as a practical tool for three-dimensional safety analysis of PWRs.