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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.
Hitesh Rajput, Tanmoy Som, Soumitra Kar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 2 | November 2015 | Pages 125-132
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-154
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fuel used in nuclear reactors contains fissile material. The fission process releases a huge amount of energy, and hence, the fissioning components must be held in a robust form capable of enduring high operating temperatures and an intense radiation environment. The shape and integrity of the fuel structures must be maintained over a period of several years within the reactor core to prevent the leakage of fission products into the reactor coolant. Further, the fuel rods must be in a nondistorted state for proper alignment in the fuel assembly to ensure proper fuel bundle power distribution. Improper core power distribution can breach the safety and operational limits on fuel and channel powers. The strategy discussed includes the methodology to verify the fuel assembly using image processing techniques. The methodology uses the Radon transform and contains four phases: image reading, preprocessing, Radon transform, and verification. The approach has been validated on 1026 fuel assemblies of a nuclear power plant, for which experimental results are shown.