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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.
Jun Li, Man-Sung Yim, David McNelis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 162 | Number 3 | June 2008 | Pages 293-307
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3957
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The development of a fuzzy logic-based barrier (FLB) method for the evaluation of the proliferation resistance of nuclear fuel cycle systems is described in this paper. The method is based on using a group of system-dependent, measurable, or quantifiable variables to define the proliferation barrier effectiveness of a system as fuzzy numbers. The usefulness of the FLB method and the resulting metric in quantifying the proliferation resistance of fuel cycle systems was also investigated by applying it to three fuel cycles, i.e., light water reactor-once-through, light water reactor with mixed oxide fuel, and direct use of spent pressurized water reactor fuel in CANDU reactor. To address the issue of subjectivity in assigning barrier weighting factors or fuzzy numbers, the sensitivity of the results to the definition of fuzzy numbers and weighting schemes was also investigated.