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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.
Igor Krivitski, Mikhail Vorotyntsev, Valentin Pyshin, Ludmila Korobeinikova
Nuclear Technology | Volume 143 | Number 3 | September 2003 | Pages 281-289
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3417
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The solving of ecological problems of future nuclear power is connected with the solving of long-lived radioactive waste utilization problems. This concerns primarily plutonium and minor actinides (neptunium, americium, and curium), accumulated in the spent fuel of nuclear reactors. One of the ways this can be solved is to use a fast reactor with uranium-free fuel. The physics of this type of reactor was widely investigated during the last year for the BN-800 reactor. The solutions of the most important problems were (a) a decrease in nonuniformity of the power distribution and (b) an increase of the Doppler effect. The next stage of such core investigations is an evaluation of self-protection to beyond-design accidents. Preliminary results show a high safety level of the BN-800 reactor with uranium-free fuel in unprotected loss-of-flow and unprotected transient overpower events.