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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.”
John Acierno, Elia Merzari, Logan Burnett, Yue Jin, Emilio Baglietto, Hangbok Choi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 7 | July 2024 | Pages 1223-1244
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2337367
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents the development of a benchmark for predicting thermal striping through simulation. This work utilized large eddy simulation and will be used to benchmark future models. The testing domain was created using both the STRUCT and the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes turbulence models and is based on an earlier design of the General Atomics Fast Modular Reactor upper plenum. The plenum features two adjacent, identical hexagonal bundles each with a center-placed axial rod drive, with a hot left coolant stream and a cold right coolant stream. The simulation solves the nondimensional Navier-Stokes equations, with temperature accounted as a passive scalar. First- and second-order flow statistics were obtained after 600 convective time units of averaging. The first-order statistics reveal that the hot jet is damped by a recirculatory flow from the near wall. At the same location, the second-order statistics show strong oscillations both in velocity and temperature. The power spectral density was utilized to determine that a low-frequency oscillation occurs here that is within the range of interest for thermal striping. Furthermore, proper orthogonal decomposition was used to identify coherent structures that confirm the oscillatory behavior, indicative of thermal striping. Overall, this benchmark can aid in the development of future models for predicting thermal striping in nuclear reactors, potentially leading to improved reactor safety and performance.