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North American construction is back—smaller and faster—at OPG’s Darlington
“The nuclear renaissance is real here,” said Ontario Power Generation’s Subo Sinnathamby on May 8, one year to the day after OPG secured a final investment decision to build the first of four planned BWRX-300 reactors at its Darlington nuclear power plant, and shortly after the new reactor’s foundation was lifted into place. “We got our license to construct in April and our [final investment decision] in May, and we’ve been off to the races since.”
Behrooz Khorsandi, Mehdi Reisi Fard, Thomas E. Blue, Don W. Miller, Wolfgang Windl
Nuclear Technology | Volume 159 | Number 2 | August 2007 | Pages 208-220
Technical Paper | Radiation Measurements and Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3866
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Focusing on the gas turbine-modular helium reactor (GT-MHR), we have developed methods to predict the positions in a nuclear reactor where silicon carbide (SiC) semiconductor diode detectors may work functionally as neutron monitors for at least one refueling cycle. Using MCNP and TRIM, we determined the count rate due to fast neutron-induced primary knock-on atoms and tritons, and the number of displacement damage defects that are created per count and over a refueling cycle, for SiC diode detectors placed at four different radial locations in the central reflector of the GT-MHR. We found that although the total count rates for the SiC detectors placed in locations close to the fuel elements were highest (~1.2 × 106 counts/s), at those locations the detectors cannot tolerate the damage caused by fast neutrons for a reactor refueling cycle. On the contrary, for SiC detectors placed at the center of the central reflector, where the thermal neutron flux is the dominant flux component, the detectors can survive a GT-MHR refueling cycle. At this location, the total count rate for the SiC diode detectors that we have analyzed is ~1.6 × 105 counts/s.