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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.
Woan Hwang, Ho Chun Suk, Won Mok Jae
Nuclear Technology | Volume 95 | Number 3 | September 1991 | Pages 314-324
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT91-A34580
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A comprehensive fission gas release model is developed by considering the behavior of multiple bubble sizes on the fuel grain boundary in terms of relevant physical parameters. This model takes into account bubble migration and coalescence; critical bubble size, which depends on the thermal gradient on the grain boundary; and the lenticular shape of the bubbles. Booth’s classical diffusion theory is directly adopted in the modeling of intragranular fission gas behavior. To consider the bubble drift due to the thermal gradient, those bubbles that exceed the critical bubble size are assumed to be left on the grain boundary and to migrate along the thermal gradient until they encounter free voidages. Use of this model in the KAFEPA code, which predicts the absolute magnitude and the trend of the gas release depending on power history, gives better agreement with the experimental data than the predictions of the model in the ELESIM code, which considers only a single bubble size at the grain boundary.