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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.
Cheng-Der Wang, Chaung Lin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 176 | Number 1 | October 2011 | Pages 72-82
Technical Paper | Second Seminar on Accelerated Testing of Materials in Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Waste Storage Systems / Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12543
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method for the automatic design of a boiling water reactor (BWR) control rod (CR) pattern (CRP) was developed using the rank-based ant system, which is an effective optimization algorithm for a combinatorial optimization problem. The designed BWR CRP followed either the A2-B1-A1-B2 or the A1-B2-A2-B1 sequence in this study. After the CRP was determined, the SIMULATE-3 code was used to calculate the axial power distribution, the effective multiplication factor keff, the shutdown margin, and three thermal limits-which were then used to evaluate the CRP and update the pheromone concentration. The developed methodology was demonstrated using design CRPs for several fuel loading patterns, showing that the designed patterns can be obtained within a reasonable computation time and with an acceptable cycle length.
