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Launching into tomorrow: NRIC guides new era of research and deployment
In June 2025, the Department of Energy announced the Reactor Pilot Program, an authorization pathway that allowed reactor developers to partner with the DOE to get first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactors built and tested. Soon after, the DOE rolled out a complementary Fuel Line Pilot Program, which aimed to fast-track fuel projects. In all, 20 projects were accepted into the new programs.
Stojan Petelin, Borut Mavko, Bostjan Koncar, Yassin A. Hassan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 158 | Number 1 | April 2007 | Pages 56-68
Technical Paper | Best Estimate Methods | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3824
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper provides a scaling methodology that was applied for scaling of the BETHSY integral test facility to the real nuclear power plant (NPP). The similarity of physical phenomena between the BETHSY experimental facility and the scaled-up model (representation of the real NPP) was analyzed on the small-break loss-of-coolant accident (SBLOCA) scenario. A comprehensive numerical analysis using the RELAP5 thermal-hydraulic code was performed to evaluate the optimal scaling-up of the BETHSY facility to the real NPP. In order to investigate the phenomenological scaling-up basis, two enlarged RELAP5 input models were constructed, differing in scaling criteria for the primary cooling system: proportional volume scaling and scaling based on the Froude number. A better agreement with the physical phenomena of the SBLOCA experiment was achieved in the case of proportional volume scaling. In addition, scaling of heat structures was also analyzed. It was shown that the best predictions of the transient phenomena were obtained when the heat structures were scaled according to the tensile stress criterion.