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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.
Sherif S. Nafee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 187 | Number 3 | September 2014 | Pages 328-336
Technical Note | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-106
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The calibration of high-purity germanium gamma-ray cylindrical detectors using bar (parallelepiped) sources is carried out analytically using the probability correction approach. Improved expressions for the source self-attenuation coefficient have been included in the present algorithm based on the accurate calculation of all possible path lengths covered by the gamma ray inside the bulky source. Moreover, the full-energy peak attenuation coefficient μp is included in the present algorithm. The sources were positioned at long distances from the detector window so that the coincidence summing effects could be neglected. Remarkable agreement between the measured efficiency values and the corrected efficiency values calculated by the present technique was observed. The percentage relative differences for the results calculated in this way from experimental values are at least 25% smaller than those observed and reported by the direct mathematical method in previous work.