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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.
Cheol Ho Pyeon, Hiroyuki Nakano, Masao Yamanaka, Takahiro Yagi, Tsuyoshi Misawa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 2 | November 2015 | Pages 181-190
Technical Paper | Accelerators | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-111
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At the Kyoto University Critical Assembly, a series of reactor physics experiments on the accelerator-driven system (ADS) coupled with the fixed-field alternating gradient (FFAG) accelerator are carried out, and the spallation neutrons generated by 100-MeV protons from the FFAG accelerator are successfully injected into the cores. In the ADS experiments, the neutron characteristics of the solid target are investigated through static and kinetic analyses, when the external neutron source of the neutron spectrum (the W, W-Be, or Pb-Bi target) is varied. The results demonstrate that the neutron yield is large with the W target, but a discrepancy is observed between the experiments and the calculations, because the experimental uncertainty of proton monitoring is attributable to defocusing of proton beams. With the use of reaction rate distribution in the core region, the static parameters are estimated fairly well in the analyses of the neutron multiplication and subcritical multiplication factor. In the kinetic experiments, the variation of the solid target used is clearly evident in the prompt neutron decay constant and the subcriticality.