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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.
Yassin A. Hassan, Wael A. Ibrahim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 119 | Number 1 | July 1997 | Pages 11-28
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT77-A35391
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Turbulent flow is characterized by random fluctuations in the fluid velocity and by intense mixing of the fluid. A wide range of eddies exists in the flow field. Because these eddies carry mass, momentum, and energy, this enhanced mixing can sometimes lead to serious problems, such as tube vibrations in many engineering systems that include fluid-tube bundle combinations. Nuclear fuel bundles and pressurized water reactor (PWR) steam generators are existing examples of fluid-tube bundle combinations in nuclear power plants. One of the critical areas in PWR steam generators is the weld between the tubes and the tube plate. Fluid-induced vibration problems are often discovered during the operation of such systems because some of the fluid-tube interaction characteristics are not fully understood. Large-eddy simulation, incorporated in three-dimensional computer codes, became one of the promising techniques to estimate flow turbulence. An investigation of the complex flow turbulence in tube bundles was carried out. Simulation of flow across tube bundles with various pitch-to-diameter ratios was performed. Power spectral densities of drag and lift coefficients were used for comparison with experimental data. Estimation of flow-length scales and other important turbulence-related parameters were obtained. Finally, important characteristics of the turbulent flow field were presented with the aid offlow visualization, using both vector and vorticity plots and the flow paths of flow tracers embedded in the flow field.