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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.
Chih-Tien Liu, Hund-Der Yeh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 143 | Number 3 | September 2003 | Pages 322-334
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3420
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper is to study the effects of fracture width on the transport of a radionuclide in a multiple and parallel fractured rock formation. The equation describing the transport of the radionuclide released from the geological repository includes the following mechanisms: advection, dispersion, radioactive decay, and adsorption on the fracture surfaces. The concentration at the inlet of each fracture is assumed constant. An analytical solution was derived based on such a mathematical model by the Laplace transform technique. The solution indicates that identical concentration distributions can be observed in each fracture of the equal-width parallel fractured system. In an unequal-width fractured system, the penetration distances along wide fractures are generally larger than that in a single uniform fractured system. The radionuclide concentration in the wide fracture quickly reaches source concentration in the near-field environment, confirming that the fracture width plays an important role in radionuclide transport through a system of multiple and parallel fractured media.