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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.
Alex Galperin, Kurt Hofer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 108 | Number 1 | October 1994 | Pages 1-12
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A35038
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Performing complicated engineering analyses of a nuclear power plant requires storage and manipulation of a large amount of information, both data and knowledge. This information is characterized by its multidisciplinary nature, complexity, and diversity. The problems caused by inefficient and lengthy manual operations involving the data flow management within the framework of the safety-related analysis of a power plant can be solved by applying the computer aided engineering principles. These principles are the basis of the design of an integrated information storage system (IRIS). The basic idea is to create a computerized environment, which includes both database and functional capabilities. Consideration and analysis of the data types and required data manipulation capabilities as well as operational requirements, resulted in the choice of an object-oriented database management system (OODBMS) as a development platform for solving the software engineering problems. Several advantages of OODBMSs over conventional relations database systems were found of crucial importance, especially providing the necessary flexibility for different data types and extensibility potential. A detailed design of a data model is produced for the plant technical data and for the storage of analysis results. The overall system architecture was designed to assure the feasibility of integrating database capabilities with procedures and functions written in conventional algorithmic programming languages.