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Diversification and the common ground
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
Who would have thought, just a few years ago, that we would see so many long-standing barriers to new nuclear development falling like dominoes? Public opinion, policy, regulatory reform, finance and investment, design maturity, nuclear fuel enrichment, and fuel fabrication capacity have all advanced with remarkable speed in the United States.
Conventional wisdom holds that the most effective way to scale up the nuclear supply chain is to do so strategically, matching investments to the needs of reactor developers.
Jack Galloway, Joshua Richard, Cetin Unal
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 1 | October 2022 | Pages S50-S62
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2053488
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Versatile Test Reactor (VTR) is a sodium-cooled fast reactor designed to accelerate the design and approval of new nuclear material and reactor concepts by providing a high neutron fast flux environment on U.S. soil. To ensure that the reactor simultaneously achieves the target irradiation environment while maintaining sufficient margin to safety limits, supporting design analysis of the VTR has been performed using MCNP and TRACE. High-fidelity MCNP calculations have been performed that confirm design parameters, such as control rod worth and neutron and photon flux distributions, and provide needed reactivity coefficients for TRACE analyses. The MCNP simulations additionally provide fuel rod power profiles of interest to fuel performance designers and provide an excellent model for experimental cartridge design within the VTR core. TRACE simulations of several postulated transients, such as station blackout, loss of heat sink, and transient overpower, have been performed (results included here are limited to the transient overpower), and the obtained results confirm the robust safety behavior of the VTR. The TRACE simulations provide a valuable confirmatory transient analysis capability using a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission–developed safety analysis tool incorporating inputs from the high-fidelity neutronic simulations performed with MCNP. Taken together, the confirmatory analysis capability provided by MCNP and TRACE serves to further strengthen the understanding of and confidence in the VTR’s performance.