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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.
Meysam Ghaderi Mazaher, Ali Akbar Salehi, Naser Vosoughi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 4 | April 2022 | Pages 395-408
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1989932
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper, a simpler approach compared to the existing approaches is developed to analyze nuclear reactor dynamics based on the explicit Monte Carlo method. A new population control method is also introduced to prevent neutron population growth and consequent computer memory shortages, which also increases simulation speed. The scheme is applied for time-dependent particle tracking in three-dimensional arbitrary geometries in the presence of feedbacks through a code named MCSP-Explicit. Changes in material density, as well as geometry dimensions, are also considered during simulation. MCSP-Explicit can be run with either continuous or multigroup data libraries, and it is further boosted by parallel processing to speed up simulations. A number of benchmark problems are studied at the end to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach in various situations.