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NN Asks: What hurdles stand in the way of nuclear power’s global expansion?
Jake Jurewicz
Nuclear technology is mature. It provides firm power at scale with minimal externalities and has done so for decades. The core problem isn’t about the technology—it is how the plants are built. Nuclear construction has a well-documented history of cost and schedule overruns. Previous nuclear plants often spent more than twice what was first budgeted, making nuclear among the power technologies with the largest average cost overruns worldwide.
Recent projects illustrate how severe the problem can be. In South Carolina, the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion saw projected costs rise from roughly $10 billion to more than $25 billion before the project was abandoned in 2017, by which time more than $9 billion had already been spent and customers were stuck paying for a site they have yet to benefit from.
Hee-Chul Eun, Jung Hoon Choi, Yung Zun Cho, In Hak Cho, Hwan Seo Park, Geun Il Park
Nuclear Technology | Volume 188 | Number 2 | November 2014 | Pages 185-191
Technical Paper | Reprocessing | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-146
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In closed chamber distillation equipment, the distillation characteristics of LiCl-KCl eutectic salt containing rare earth phosphates were investigated to establish an operating condition to maximize the operating efficiency of the equipment. To understand the behaviors of LiCl-KCl eutectic salt in the distillation chamber, changes in the pressure in the distillation equipment were observed with a change in the temperature gradients between the vaporization chamber and condensation chamber, and the temperature distributions in the chamber were modeled using computational fluid dynamics software (ANSYS CFX). Based on these results, a model of the salt behavior in the chamber was established, and the most effective operating condition for over 99 wt% of salt recovery was determined. Many distillation experiments of LiCl-KCl eutectic salt containing rare earth phosphates were performed at the condition, and it was confirmed that the salt recovery efficiency (>99 wt%) could be consistently achieved at the condition.