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Swiss nuclear power and the case for long-term operation
Designed for 40 years but built to last far longer, Switzerland’s nuclear power plants have all entered long-term operation. Yet age alone says little about safety or performance. Through continuous upgrades, strict regulatory oversight, and extensive aging management, the country’s reactors are being prepared for decades of continued operation, in line with international practice.
Kieran Dolan, Guanyu Su, Guiqiu Zheng, Michael Ames, David Carpenter, Lin-Wen Hu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 4 | April 2023 | Pages 515-531
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2135933
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Predicting the distribution and release of tritium remains a technical challenge for advanced nuclear reactors with molten Flibe (2LiF-BeF2) salt coolants. Tritium transport models, which are currently used to forecast release behavior, are limited by uncertainty in Flibe-related tritium transport properties and by a lack of relevant benchmark experiments to test input parameters and solution methods. A new test facility has been developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research Reactor (MITR) to irradiate a molten Flibe target in an ex-core neutron beam port to further investigate tritium transport mechanisms at prototypical reactor conditions. The experiment monitored the time-dependent release of tritium from the salt-free surface and the permeation rate of tritium through the stainless steel Flibe-containing test stand. Measured results were benchmarked with a multiphysics tritium transport simulation to resolve complex effects in the test. Trends in tritium release rates from the irradiation were in agreement with the multiphysics simulation of the test, which combined computational fluid dynamics, radiative heat transfer in participating media, and tritium transport in STAR-CCM+.