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Launching into tomorrow: NRIC guides new era of research and deployment
In June 2025, the Department of Energy announced the Reactor Pilot Program, an authorization pathway that allowed reactor developers to partner with the DOE to get first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactors built and tested. Soon after, the DOE rolled out a complementary Fuel Line Pilot Program, which aimed to fast-track fuel projects. In all, 20 projects were accepted into the new programs.
Taisuke Yonomoto, Yutaka Kukita, Richard R. Schultz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 124 | Number 1 | October 1998 | Pages 18-30
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2906
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The passive residual heat removal (PRHR) system in the Westinghouse AP600 advanced passive reactor design is a natural-circulation-driven heat exchanger cooled by the water in the in-containment refueling water storage tank (IRWST). During the experiments, which simulated small-break loss-of-coolant accidents in the AP600 reactor using the ROSA-V Large-Scale Test Facility (LSTF), the PRHR system heat removal rates well exceeded the core decay power soon after the actuation of the PRHR. This resulted in continuous cooldown and depressurization of the primary side. The PRHR heat transfer performance in these experiments was analyzed by applying heat transfer correlations available in literature to the PRHR heat exchanger tube bundle. Also, the three-dimensional natural circulation in the IRWST was simulated numerically using the FLUENT code. The total heat transfer rate of the PRHR was predicted within 5% of the measured value. The fluid temperature distribution in the IRWST was also predicted well except that the elevation of the thermally stratified region was underpredicted. The calculated flow pattern in the IRWST suggests that the atypical IRWST geometry in the LSTF may have affected the PRHR heat transfer performance during the experiments only a little.