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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.
Chao Fang, Liangzhi Cao, Hongchun Wu, Kang Li
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 5 | May 2022 | Pages 526-543
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.2011667
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a stabilized finite element method (FEM) and a spherical harmonics method to discretize the space and angle of the Boltzmann transport equation. The FEM is based on the subgrid-scale (SGS) model, which decomposes the unknowns into resolvable scale and SGS with an approximation for the SGS and then embeds it into a resolvable scale formulation, which yields a stabilized variational formula with only a resolvable scale. In this method, the SGS is identified as the residual of the flux, which represents the indistinguishable high-frequency component. This method is characterized by a residual equation proposed on the subgrid, thus reflecting the relationship between the residual of the flux and the residual of the source. A simple assumption is proposed that the residual of the flux is the scaling of the residual of the source. The scaling parameter is identified as a stabilization parameter, and it takes the inverse of the norm of the transport operator. This method has been verified by various benchmark problems, and the numerical results show that it has high accuracy, stability, and void applicability.