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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.
Jae-Hyuk Eoh, Seyun Kim, Sang-Ji Kim, Seong-O Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 160 | Number 2 | November 2007 | Pages 216-232
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3894
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The KLFR is a pool-type lead-cooled fast reactor, which has a core thermal output of 900 MW(thermal), and a reactor vessel auxiliary cooling system (RVACS) is employed to secure reliable decay heat removal (DHR) during the worst anticipated design-basis condition. Since the RVACS design is based on reliable and economic considerations, a sufficiently large DHR capacity and compact reactor vessel size are desirable. However, these two requirements compete with each other because a sufficient DHR capacity can be achieved by a larger vessel size with a consequential heavy lead coolant weight. An advanced RVACS concept that has a larger capacity with a more compact vessel size was developed. To increase the DHR capacity of the KLFR, which uses natural-air circulation cooling, the feasibility of heat transfer enhancement by introducing new design concepts to essentially reduce the heat transfer resistance of the radial heat transfer elements was investigated. As a result of this work, the parametric analysis results showed that the passive DHR capacity of the KLFR can be substantially increased by up to 24% when compared with the classical RVACS concept, and this feature makes a compact reactor vessel very feasible. With the proposed advanced RVACS concept, one could expect that the heat removal capacity of an RVACS-type passive DHR system will be increased.