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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.
Qingquan Pan, Tengfei Zhang, Xiaojing Liu, Yun Cai, Lianjie Wang, Kan Wang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 2 | February 2022 | Pages 183-192
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1968223
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a high dominance ratio system, the problem of slow fission source convergence is faced during the Monte Carlo criticality calculation. The Wielandt method and the Superhistory method have been proven to reduce the dominance ratio. Still, the Wielandt method and the Superhistory method have also proven to be unable to accelerate the convergence of the fission source. With the estimation of errors in the cumulative fission source and the batch size optimization methodology, the optimal batch size growth for the Wielandt method and the Superhistory method is proposed. Compared with the direct simulation with the optimal batch size growth, the Wielandt simulation and the Superhistory simulation better use the optimal batch size growth. A single fuel rod model was tested, and the results show that the new method is helpful for the acceleration of fission source convergence.