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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Matthew Memmott, Jacopo Buongiorno, Pavel Hejzlar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 173 | Number 2 | February 2011 | Pages 162-175
Technical Paper | Fuel Design/Defects/ Examination | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A11545
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two innovative fuel concepts, the internally and externally cooled annular fuel and the bottle-shaped fuel, were investigated with the goal of increasing the power density and reducing the pressure drop in the sodium-cooled fast reactor, respectively. The concepts were explored for both high- and low-conversion core configurations and for metal and oxide fuels. The annular fuel concept is best suited for low-conversion metal-fueled cores, where it can enable a power uprate of [approximately]20%; the magnitude of the uprate is limited by the fuel-clad chemical interaction temperature constraint during a hypothetical flow blockage of the inner annular channel. The bottle-shaped fuel concept is best suited for tight high-conversion ratio cores, where it can reduce the overall core pressure drop in the fuel channels by >30%, with a corresponding increase in core height between 15 and 18%. A full-plant RELAP5-3D model was created to evaluate the transient performance of the innovative fuel configurations during the unprotected transient overpower and station blackout. The transient analysis confirmed the good thermal-hydraulic performance of the annular and bottle-shaped fuel designs with respect to the reference case with traditional solid fuel pins.