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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.
Shekhar Kumar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 11 | November 2024 | Pages 2038-2049
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2309070
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The density of aqueous solutions containing actinide nitrates is an important parameter for process design, equipment design, and remote operation/control. It is also significantly important for the estimation of atom densities during criticality calculations and related experiments involving actinide solutions. Using a massive database of 1353 points consisting of in-house-generated data as well as data published in the literature, a robust estimation of the coefficients of a re-parameterized and dimensionally consistent form of density equation was performed in the following range of parameters: U(VI) concentration 0 to 1330 g/L, Pu(IV) concentration 0 to 1201 g/L, HNO3 concentration 0 to 15.8 M, and temperature range of 283.15 to 373.15 K. This paper lists the details of the new database, the newly estimated coefficients, and the performance evaluation of the proposed re-parameterized dimensionally consistent equations.