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NN Asks: Is the U.S. ready for nuclear construction to accelerate?
Craig Stover
Yes, but . . .
The United States is better positioned today for nuclear construction than it has been in decades. Some of that comes from the experience gained at Vogtle and V.C. Summer. I was part of the team that helped start the V.C. Summer project in 2008, and at that time we were trying to build a nuclear construction workforce from scratch. We learned a lot through that effort, and many of those lessons learned have since been studied, documented, and shared.
The nuclear industry is also benefiting from the wave of investment that started growing around 2020. Over the last five or six years, there has been a serious effort across the country to get ready for new nuclear builds. The U.S. government and the private sector are investing billions of dollars in new nuclear. Much of that work is happening before widespread commercial deployment contracts are signed. This is real, and we need to prepare.
Khaled Meftah, Arthur E. Ruggles
Nuclear Technology | Volume 154 | Number 3 | June 2006 | Pages 328-334
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3737
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A scaled model boiling water reactor (SMBWR) uses water at 0.095 MPa in a transparent heated channel 0.5 m in length with four electrical heated fuel simulator rods. The axial void profile in the channel is measured using conductivity probes. The boiling channel exhibits bubbly and churn flow regimes. In the present study, the bubbly-churn regime transition is investigated using the variance, kurtosis, and skewness of the probability density function (pdf) derived from the conductivity measurements. The positioning of five conductivity sensors along the boiling water channel allows examination of the gradual changes in the flow regime characteristics. The results indicate it is possible to detect the bubbly-to-churn flow regime transition using the pdf distribution attributes of the conductivity probes.