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NRC approves TerraPower construction permit
Today, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it has approved TerraPower’s construction permit application for Kemmerer Unit 1, the company’s first deployment of Natrium, its flagship sodium fast reactor.
This approval is a significant milestone on three fronts. For TerraPower, it represents another step forward in demonstrating its technology. For the Department of Energy, it reflects progress (despite delays) for the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP). For the NRC, it is the first approval granted to a commercial reactor in nearly a decade—and the first approval of a commercial non–light water reactor in more than 40 years.
A. Bujan, B. Tóth, A. Bieliauskas, R. Zeyen, C. Housiadas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 169 | Number 1 | January 2010 | Pages 1-17
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9339
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Phébus FP tests study the phenomenology of severe accidents in water-cooled nuclear reactors. The first test, FPT0, was performed with fuel irradiated for only 1 week; the second test, FPT1, was performed with fairly similar boundary conditions but with irradiated fuel (burnup: 23 GWd/t). The objective of this work is, on the one hand, to summarize the main experimental results of these two tests concerning the behavior and transport of fission products and structural materials in the circuit and, on the other hand, to identify or to confirm any modeling weaknesses in the SOPHAEROS/ASTEC V1 module used for interpreting the experimental results. Besides comparison with available experimental data, the main results of the entire circuit analyses are compared with former SOPHAEROS/ASTEC V0 analyses and, for so-called quasi-separated steam generator tubes, with one- and two-dimensional Eulerian and Lagrangian (particle tracking) models.Concerning the transport of iodine vapor species, it is shown that the results obtained are compatible with passage of nonnegligible amounts of the measured highly volatile iodine through circuit to containment. It is also shown that these results depend heavily on the considered kinetics of Cd release from the bundle.