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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.
Miguel Ceceñas-Falcón, Robert M. Edwards
Nuclear Technology | Volume 131 | Number 1 | July 2000 | Pages 1-11
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3100
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new test platform for stability studies is presented that can be used to generate a power time series, which in turn may be used to validate the capability of boiling water reactor stability-monitoring algorithms. The thermal hydraulics for boiling channels are modeled and coupled with neutron kinetics to analyze the nonlinear dynamics of the closed-loop system. The model uses point kinetics to study core-wide oscillations, and it couples two time-domain calculations, for the fundamental and first harmonic modes, to study out-of-phase oscillations. The channel coolant flow dynamics is dominant in the power fluctuations observed by in-core nuclear instrumentation, and additive white noise is added to the solution for the channel flow in the thermal-hydraulic model to generate a noisy power time series. Autoregressive analysis performed with the computer-generated series agrees with the stability properties of the boiling channel. The operating conditions of the channel can be modified to accommodate a wide range of stability conditions.