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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.”
Emory Brown, Yikuan Yan, Wade R. Marcum
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 9 | September 2020 | Pages 1296-1307
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1724730
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Using the Laplace transform for solving a two-region (cladding/liquid) conduction problem with an exponentially increasing heat flux boundary condition, an analytic temperature profile has been found. The rate of the temperature increase in the second region (liquid) is used to determine energy deposition in the thermal boundary layer of the liquid. Energy deposition rates are then compared to the latent heat capacity of the growing thermal boundary layer to create a condition for predicting transient critical heat flux (CHF) via the heterogeneous spontaneous nucleation (HSN) trigger mechanism. These analytic predictions are then compared to existing data for exponential power ramp transients with periods ranging from 5 ms up to 10 s. Comparison with experimental data show that the trends of the expected HSN-triggered CHF are in good agreement with the magnitude being controlled by the determination of the maximum boundary layer energy. This work presents the first known attempts to derive a mechanistic CHF prediction model for HSN. Though further work is necessary to develop the HSN model (and is being pursued in parallel to this research), this work will allow for a quantitative prediction of HSN-triggered CHF. Further developments of the HSN model will inform the boundary layer energy threshold that triggers CHF.