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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.
Constantine P. Tzanos
Nuclear Technology | Volume 77 | Number 3 | June 1987 | Pages 263-278
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT87-A33966
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A model was developed for faster than real-time liquid-metal fast breeder reactor core transient analysis for purposes of continuous on-line data validation, plant state verification, and fault identification. The basic feature of this model is the use of a nodal approximation for the coolant, cladding, and fuel temperatures that gives adequately accurate power and temperature predictions with very few axial nodes. In applications of this methodology to fast loss-of-flow and overpower transients, computation times of about one-thirtieth of the real transient time per thermal-hydraulic channel were obtained. The predicted coolant and cladding temperature distributions were practically identical to those resulting from detailed finite difference computations. The predicted fuel temperatures differed by ∼1% or less from those obtained from the same finite difference computations. The analysis of the Transient Reactor Test Facility experiment TS-1C and the Experimental Breeder Reactor II experiment SHRT-17 showed very good agreement between model predictions and measurements.