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In quickest review, NRC approves 20-year renewal for Robinson
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has renewed the Robinson nuclear power plant’s operating license in record time, the agency announced last week.
The subsequent license renewal process for the Hartsville, S.C., facility was completed within 12 months, according to the NRC. The process has typically taken 18 months. This was the first license renewal review conducted under the directive of Executive Order 14300 to streamline processes like renewing operating licenses.
Constantine P. Tzanos
Nuclear Technology | Volume 119 | Number 1 | July 1997 | Pages 1-10
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT77-A35390
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The impact of wind velocity on the performance of the reactor vessel auxiliary cooling system (RVACS) of an advanced liquid-metal reactor design is analyzed, and design modifications that mitigate adverse wind effects are investigated. In the reference design, the reactor is served by four communicating RVACS stacks, and each stack has two air inlets. In this two-inlet stack design, winds blowing in a direction 90 deg from the axis formed by the two stack inlets result in pressure distributions around the stacks that drastically change the desired airflow pattern in the RVACS. This leads to significantly elevated RVACS air temperatures and significant azimuthal guard vessel temperature variations. For example, a 27 m/s (60 mph) wind leads to an air temperature at the exit of the RVACS heated section that is ∼115°C higher than that under no-wind conditions. The addition of two more inlets per stack, one inlet per stack side, significantly improves RVACS performance. The air temperature at the exit of the heated RVACS section is significantly reduced below that of the two-inlet design, and this temperature decreases as the wind speed increases. An increase in wind speed from 3 to 27 m/s leads to an air temperature change from 186 to 165°C. The azimuthal temperature variation is also improved. At the top of the guard vessel, this variation is reduced from 62.5 to 8.5°Cat the low wind speed of 3 m/s and from 85.0 to 30.5°C at the high wind speed of 27 m/s.