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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.
Hyun Kook Shin, Sang Ku Nam, Se Do Sohn, Hoon Seon Chang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 141 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 33-44
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technologies | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3347
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The advanced digital reactor protection system (ADRPS) with diverse dual processors has been developed to prevent common-mode failure (CMF). The principle of diversity is applied to both hardware design and software design. For hardware diversity, two different types of CPUs are used for the bistable processor and local coincidence logic (LCL) processor. The Versa Module Eurocard-based single board computers are used for the CPU hardware platforms. The QNX operating system and the VxWorks operating system were selected for software diversity. Functional diversity is also applied to the input and output modules, and to the algorithm in the bistable processors and LCL processors. The characteristics of the newly developed digital protection system are described together with the preventive capability against CMF. Also, system reliability analysis is discussed. The evaluation results show that the ADRPS has a good preventive capability against the CMF and is a highly reliable reactor protection system.