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North American construction is back—smaller and faster—at OPG’s Darlington
“The nuclear renaissance is real here,” said Ontario Power Generation’s Subo Sinnathamby on May 8, one year to the day after OPG secured a final investment decision to build the first of four planned BWRX-300 reactors at its Darlington nuclear power plant, and shortly after the new reactor’s foundation was lifted into place. “We got our license to construct in April and our [final investment decision] in May, and we’ve been off to the races since.”
Ethan S. Chaleff, Nikolas Antolin, Wolfgang Windl, Thomas Blue
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 1 | October 2018 | Pages 59-65
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1464288
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Molten salts have been proposed as coolants for numerous advanced reactor designs. It is envisioned that these reactors, both fluoride-salt–cooled high-temperature reactors and molten-salt–fueled reactors will operate at high temperatures, where the radiative heat transfer properties of the salts may be required for accurate heat transfer analysis. Experimental challenges have prevented the measurement of absorption coefficients in most salts. In an attempt to fill this gap in data, the Vienna Ab-Initio Simulation Package is used in the present research to calculate the absorption coefficient resulting from photoelectric interactions in numerous molten salts. Ab-initio molecular dynamics is used to generate the amorphous structures of a variety of salts. The pure halide salts LiF, FLiNaK, and FLiBe, are shown to be optically clear through a wide portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Conversely, the transition metal fluoride salt KF-ZrF4 is shown to be substantially opaque. As chromium is a known impurity of concern from the corrosion of steels in reactor environments, the effect on absorption of low levels of chromium in an otherwise transparent salt is investigated and found to significantly increase absorption at relevant wavelengths.