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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.
Chun-Sheng Chien, Shih-Jen Wang, Shih-Kuei Cheng
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 1 | January 1996 | Pages 21-28
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35196
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The MELCOR code, developed by Sandia National Laboratories, is suitable for calculating source terms and simulating severe accident phenomena of nuclear power plants. Prior to simulating a severe accident transient with MELCOR, the initial steady-state conditions must be generated in advance. The current MELCOR users’ manuals do not provide a self-initialization procedure; this is the reason users have to adjust the initial conditions by themselves through a trial-and-error approach. A MELCOR self-initialization algorithm for boiling water reactor plants has been developed, which eliminates the tedious trial-and-error procedures and improves the simulation accuracy. This algorithm adjusts the important plant variables such as the dome pressure, downcomer level, and core flow rate to the desired conditions automatically. It is implemented through input with control functions provided in MELCOR. The reactor power and feedwater temperature are fed as input data. The initialization work of full-power conditions of the Kuosheng nuclear power station is cited as an example. These initial conditions are generated successfully with the developed algorithm. The generated initial conditions can be stored in a restart file and used for transient analysis. The methodology in this study improves the accuracy and consistency of transient calculations. Meanwhile, the algorithm provides all MELCOR users an easy and correct method for establishing the initial conditions.