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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Ana Da Silva, Pradip Saha, Eric P. Loewen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 196 | Number 1 | October 2016 | Pages 74-88
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT16-55
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The legacy electromagnetic (EM) pump analysis tool MATRIX has been improved by the addition of a thermal analysis module. Although the module is patterned after the general-purpose Advanced General Electric Network Analyzer (AGENA) code, it is developed from a more fundamental approach to provide a better understanding and control of the thermal analysis of the EM pump. The MATRIX results are verified against the AGENA results and the test data from the 160 m3/min large EM pump tests, which provided a good estimate of the thermal conductance between the lamination and the inner duct wall. Full and good contact between the lamination and the inner duct wall is necessary to keep the copper conductor temperatures low. Parametric studies, as expected, confirmed the correct trend of increasing copper conductor temperatures with increasing frequency. The MATRIX results show that a new proposed insulation material for the future EM pumps is beneficial since it could reduce the copper block temperature by ~20°C. Such analysis can help develop a better EM pump with a more compact design and better insulation material.
