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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.
Nicholas Crowder, Joomyung Lee, Abhinav Gupta, Kevin Han, Saran Bodda, Christopher Ritter
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 1 | October 2022 | Pages S260-S277
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2055705
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Designing piping systems for nuclear power plants involves engineers from multiple disciplines (i.e., thermal hydraulics, mechanical engineering, and structural/seismic) and close coordination with the contractors who build the plant. Any design changes during construction need to be carefully communicated and managed with all stakeholders in order to assess risks associated with the design changes. To allow the quick assessment of building and piping design changes through a streamlined building-piping coupled analysis, this paper presents a novel interoperability solution that converts bidirectionally between building information models (BIMs) and pipe stress models. Any design changes during construction that are shown in an as-built BIM are automatically converted into a pipe stress model. Any further design changes due to building-piping interaction analyses are converted back to the BIM for the contractor and other designers to access the latest model. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the bidirectional conversion that allows an integrated coupled analysis of the building-piping system to account for their interactions.