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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.
Yoshitaka Chikazawa, Atsushi Katoh, Hiroyuki Hayafune, Yoshio Shimakawa, Yoshio Kamishima
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 2 | November 2015 | Pages 111-124
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-151
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Severe external hazards on the Japan Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (JSFR) have been analyzed and evaluated. For seismic design, safety components are confirmed to maintain their functions even against recent strong earthquakes. Integrity of the major components has been confirmed covering recent earthquake conditions. In the case of a tsunami, the seawater pumps for the component cooling water system (CCWS) could be damaged by the tsunami, since they are located at sea level. In the JSFR design with full natural convection decay heat removal systems (DHRSs) and an air-cooling emergency gas turbine, safety-grade components are independent of CCWS, and loss of CCWS does not affect reactor cooling. As a conservative case, hypothetical station blackout (SBO) has been evaluated. In the case of SBO, decay heat is removed by natural convection DHRS, but control of the air cooler (AC) damper is lost after the battery power is out. The analysis has revealed that freezing at one of three ACs could happen due to loss of automatic control of AC dampers. However, the time margin to protected loss of heat sink is evaluated to be >10 days. Manual control of the AC damper is also investigated. Transient analyses show that the AC dampers can be controlled manually adopting a simple operation procedure with sufficient operation time. Decay heat cooling in the case of collapse in all air stacks of AC has been evaluated. The result shows that decay heat could be removed maintaining air paths in two of three ACs by accident management. In conclusion, JSFR in the 2010 design version has enough external hazard toughness mainly thanks to passive safety features and a seismic isolation system.