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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.
Farzad Rahnema, Ryan Hon, Steven Douglass
Nuclear Technology | Volume 184 | Number 1 | October 2013 | Pages 1-28
Technical Paper | Reactor Physics / Pressurized Water Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-124
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper fully describes a whole-core benchmark problem based on a small two-loop pressurized water reactor composed of UO2 and MOX fuel assemblies. The specification includes heterogeneity at both the assembly and the core levels. The geometry and material compositions are fully described, and multigroup material cross-section libraries are provided in the two-group, four-group, and eight-group formats. Detailed Monte Carlo reference solutions including core eigenvalue, assembly-averaged fission distribution, and selected fuel pin fission density distributions are presented for benchmarking diffusion and transport methods. Three different core configurations are presented in this paper, namely, all-rods-out, all-rods-in, and some-rods-in.