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NRC grants license for TRISO-X fuel manufacturing using HALEU
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has granted X-energy subsidiary TRISO-X a special nuclear material license for high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel fabrication. The license applies to TRISO-X’s first two planned commercial facilities, known as TX-1 and TX-2, for an initial 40-year period. The facilities are set to be the first new nuclear fuel fabrication plants licensed by the NRC in more than 50 years.
Xiaomeng Dong, Juliana P. Duarte, Zhijian Zhang, Michael L. Corradini, Zhaofei Tian, Guangliang Chen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 199 | Number 2 | August 2017 | Pages 174-186
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2017.1326781
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Numerical simulation has been widely used in nuclear reactor safety analyses to gain insight into key phenomena. This paper compares simulations of a single-phase steady flow in a 2 × 2 rod bundle with spacer grids among different codes based on the high pressure heat transfer facility at University of Wisconsin. The detailed computational fluid dynamics modeling methodology was developed using FLUENT to help in the facility design and pretest analyses. After comparison between different turbulence models, the Standard k-ω was chosen to simulate the effect of unheated solid walls and grid spacers. It was found that solid walls had a small influence on the flow and heat transfer behavior. We note the effect of rod-to-wall gap needs be taken into account if it is larger than half of the gap between the rods. We compared the simulations of FLUENT, COBRA-TF, and TRACE to determine the position of thermocouples to be used in the planned experiments. An investigation was performed on the effect of bending angles of the grid spacer mixing vanes. Results showed that a larger bending angle results in higher turbulence mixing and locally higher Nusselt numbers downstream of the mixing vanes. Also, a small change of the bending angles results in a notable difference in the temperature distributions of the main flow.