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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.
Andreas Ikonomopoulos, Miltiadis Alamaniotis, Stylianos Chatzidakis, Lefteri H. Tsoukalas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 182 | Number 1 | April 2013 | Pages 1-12
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15821
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel machine learning approach for nuclear power plant modeling and state identification is presented together with its test results using data from the Loss-of-Fluid Test experimental facility. The approach exploits Gaussian processes whose principal function is to tackle the temporal problem of forecasting the actual system state in the varying environment of a nuclear reactor facility that undergoes successive overcooling transients. The approach fuses independent Gaussian process expert predictions to provide a single recommendation to the plant operators in a form that is suitable to appear on a decision support system screen. A variety of test cases are developed to explore the validity and relevance of Gaussian processes. The proposed implementation is examined with various predictor variables under different conditions, and the results obtained are in accordance with model expectations.