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Developing a new regulatory framework for advanced reactors: Update on Part 53
White
The American Nuclear Society’s Risk-informed, Performance-based Principles and Policy Committee (RP3C) on March 29 held another presentation in its monthly Community of Practice (CoP) series. The presenter, Patrick White with the Nuclear Innovation Alliance (NIA), talked about the current status of efforts to develop a new regulatory framework for advanced reactors—known as 10 CFR Part 53 or simply Part 53. White serves as the research director of the NIA, where he leads their research as well as analysis-based stakeholder and policymaker engagement and education. White’s March 29 presentation is publicly available on YouTube and at ANS’s publication platform Nuclear Science and Technology Open Research (NSTOR).
RP3C chair N. Prasad Kadambi opened the CoP with brief introductory remarks about the RP3C before he welcomed White as the session’s presenter.
White covered three main topics: the history of the existing regulatory frameworks for new reactors, progress to date on the development of the Part 53 rule for advanced reactors, and the current status and next steps for the Part 53 rulemaking process.
P. Kalyanasundaram, Baldev Raj, V. Prakash, Ramakrishna Ranga
Nuclear Technology | Volume 182 | Number 3 | June 2013 | Pages 249-258
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors/Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A16977
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) is pool-type, sodium-cooled reactor. PFBR has eight steam generators (SGs) in its secondary circuit. The availability of SG units in the secondary circuit is of critical importance, as this determines the entire plant availability. Constant exposure to high temperature and high pressure may result in water or steam leaks in the tubes of SGs by which sodium and water reaction will take place. The growth in a leak may lead to tube rupture and large pressure increase in the secondary circuit. So, an important requirement from the viewpoints of safety and economics is to detect leaks at the incipient stage. Hydrogen detection methods, which are currently used to detect the initiation of steam leaks to sodium, involve transport delays, as the hydrogen evolved during the leak has to reach the sensor location. It is possible to detect a leak of 1 g/s within 1 s by acoustic leak detection. Another advantage is that it is possible to locate the position of a leak by installing several acoustic sensors on a SG.Experiments to develop a suitable signal-processing technique were carried out in the Steam Generator Test Facility (SGTF); argon was injected into sodium at argon pressure of 2 to 10 MPa through a 0.5-mm orifice. Signal-processing techniques, an autoregressive noise variance technique, and a wavelet detailed coefficient variance technique were studied and compared for their sensitivity to detect a steam/water leak. The acoustic technique employing wavelet decomposition is found to be promising for detecting a leak at the incipient stage. This paper discusses the details of the experiments carried out and the instrumentation and signal analysis techniques used for leak detection in SGs.