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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.
Yoshitaka Chikazawa, Masayuki Uzawa, Shinichi Usui, Katsuhiro Tozawa, Shoji Kotake
Nuclear Technology | Volume 177 | Number 3 | March 2012 | Pages 293-302
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13476
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The JSFR is a commercial sodium-cooled fast reactor that has been studied in the Fast Reactor Cycle Technology Development (FaCT) project since 2006. For JSFR fuel handling, various fuel-handling systems (FHSs) were investigated, and an advanced FHS with an ex-vessel storage tank (EVST) was selected. This paper summarizes the various FHS concepts and comparisons among those concepts. In the reference system, spent-fuel subassemblies are cooled in the EVST before transfer to the spent-fuel storage pool. The other FHS concepts investigated are evolutional FHSs without an EVST. The result has indicated that the construction cost of the evolutional systems does not reduce the construction cost dramatically, which is mainly due to additional safety measures that required higher decay heat handling in a gas atmosphere and separated fresh and failed fuel storage. From an economics point of view, a longer plant outage of the evolutional systems offsets its advantage of the lower construction cost. Based on the results of this comparative study, JSFR selected the FHS with an EVST.