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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.
Miltiadis Alamaniotis, Sangkyu Lee, Tatjana Jevremovic
Nuclear Technology | Volume 191 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 41-57
Technical Paper | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-75
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Radioisotope identification from low-count-rate spectra or spectra obtained through low-resolution detectors constitutes a challenging environment for accurate spectral analysis. The use of intelligent processing algorithms is a significant step in analyzing spectra, conceivably increasing the accuracy of the nuclide identification in such scenarios. This paper introduces an intelligent methodology for automated processing of low-count gamma-ray spectra acquired with a scintillation detector aimed at identifying radioisotope patterns, and it evaluates the performance of this methodology against a set of experimentally acquired gamma-ray spectra. The novel methodology adopts tools from the “artificial intelligence library” to preprocess the spectrum and subsequently identify radioisotopes. In particular, in the preprocessing step, the measured spectrum is divided into equally long energy intervals, whose values are replaced with those computed by a support vector regressor equipped with a linear kernel function. In the next step, the fuzzy logic–based identifier matches spectral peaks with entries in the spectral library, aiming at identifying isotopic signatures in the spectrum. The proposed intelligent methodology is benchmarked against the multiple-linear-regression (MLR) spectrum-fitting algorithm. Assessment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in identifying isotopes compared with the MLR algorithm by significantly reducing the number of false detections and improving correct detection performance. Furthermore, the proposed methodology exhibits an overall higher detection sensitivity (by 13.3%) and precision (by 46.8%) than those obtained with MLR.