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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.
Hooman Javidnia, Jin Jiang, Majid Borairi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 165 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 174-189
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A4084
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents the development of a flexible and user-friendly reactor core dynamic model of a CANadian Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor for control system applications using the commercial simulation package MATLAB/SIMULINK. The reactor core is divided into 14 zones, and a set of coupled kinetics equations are developed to describe the dynamic behavior of the zones. The interaction between neighboring zones is characterized in terms of coupling coefficients, which basically describe the possibility of a neutron born in one zone causing a nuclear reaction in another zone. The model also includes the dynamics of the xenon and iodine. Nondimensionalized representations of the reactor dynamic model are derived in detail. It is demonstrated that vectorization of dynamic variables can significantly simplify the modeling and simulation process for a multizone reactor. Transient behavior of the reactor has been simulated using the developed model.