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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.
Baiba V. Harrington, Geoffrey Constantine
Nuclear Technology | Volume 109 | Number 1 | January 1995 | Pages 11-20
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35065
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A calculational model of the entire core of the DIDO class reactor HIFAR has been used to analyze epithermal neutron beam experiments. In the experiments, an off-center fuel element was replaced by a dummy fuel element voided by a dry liner in which an aluminium spectrum shifter was suspended at core center to extract the beam. Various combinations of the filter materials aluminum, iron, sulfur, titanium, and cadmium were inserted near the top of the dry liner, and liquid argon was placed in a cryostat above the dummy element. Reaction rates were measured in a fission chamber, sandwiched between various thicknesses of polyethylene, in order to assess the accuracy of the calculational model for different regions of the neutron energy spectrum of the beam. The neutron source distribution of the HIFAR core was obtained from a three-dimensional diffusion calculation, with burnup-dependent fuel compositions and fission products included, using the AUS modular code scheme. Argon cross sections were generated from ENDL-84 data and resonance parameters taken from Neutron Cross Sections (1984). A whole-core MCNP source calculation was used to analyze the experiments giving good agreement between measured and calculated reaction rates. This whole-core model of HIFAR may be applied with confidence to predict the performance of filtered beams for boron neutron capture therapy and also to other HIFAR calculations.