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NN Asks: What hurdles stand in the way of nuclear power’s global expansion?
Jake Jurewicz
Nuclear technology is mature. It provides firm power at scale with minimal externalities and has done so for decades. The core problem isn’t about the technology—it is how the plants are built. Nuclear construction has a well-documented history of cost and schedule overruns. Previous nuclear plants often spent more than twice what was first budgeted, making nuclear among the power technologies with the largest average cost overruns worldwide.
Recent projects illustrate how severe the problem can be. In South Carolina, the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion saw projected costs rise from roughly $10 billion to more than $25 billion before the project was abandoned in 2017, by which time more than $9 billion had already been spent and customers were stuck paying for a site they have yet to benefit from.
Stephen King, Thien Nguyen, Yassin Hassan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 7 | July 2024 | Pages 1245-1257
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2259699
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
New developments in porous media modeling have allowed for a new opportunity to implement experimental data for validation and verification. This includes velocity measurements using particle image velocimetry and global pressure drop measurements that are used to produce pressure drop correlations. We conducted such experiments on two very similar facilities of packed spheres by the authors of this paper. The results from the measurements are presented in this paper as a complete experimental study of a packed bed of smooth spheres through a two-prong approach. First, a set of global pressure drop correlations are validated with experimental data and presented as a function of porous Reynolds numbers. Second, the local velocity measurements from three depths spanning 2.4 sphere diameters are presented and further analyzed through the use of a normalized probability distribution function of the time-resolved velocity field. The conclusion of this paper is a suggestion for the results to be used in the creation or validation of computational fluid dynamics porous media models in the measured flow regimes for a packed bed of smooth spheres with an aspect ratio between the sphere diameter and the empty column diameter of 4.4.