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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Hiroshi Sekimoto, Zaki Su’ud
Nuclear Technology | Volume 109 | Number 3 | March 1995 | Pages 307-313
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT109-307
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A conceptual design study of small long-life nuclear power reactors used for a remote or isolated area has been performed. Lead as well as lead-bismuth is employed as the coolant, and both metallic and nitride fuels are investigated. There are some severe requirements on these reactors for operability, maintainability, safety, and proliferation resistance. Some important characteristics of the proposed designs [150 MW(thermal)] are the following: transportability between reactor factory and operation site; capability of long-life operation (12 yr) without refueling or fuel shuffling while maintaining burnup reactivity swing less than 0.1% Δk; negative total core coolant void coefficient of reactivity over all the burnup period; omission of intermediate heat exchanger; and a relatively large contribution of natural circulation.