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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.
Hidemasa Yamano, Shigenobu Kubo, Ken-Ichi Kurisaka, Yoshio Shimakawa, Hiromi Sago
Nuclear Technology | Volume 170 | Number 1 | April 2010 | Pages 159-169
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 2008 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-6
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An advanced large-scale sodium-cooled fast reactor named JSFR adopts an innovative two-loop cooling system. This cooling system design raises major technological issues: hydraulic and structural integrity due to the increase in one-loop coolant flow rate, safety design against the break or failure in one-loop piping, and ensuring the reliability of the decay heat removal system (DHRS). The present paper describes the investigation of the piping structural integrity due to flow-induced vibration using a 1/3-scale hot-leg piping test. The structural integrity of the hot-leg piping in the JSFR design has been confirmed by a flow-induced vibration analytical methodology, verified with the experimental data. Additional experimental results have revealed that hydraulic issues including gas entrainment and vortex cavitation could be prevented by some design measures. By applying appropriate safety design, the two-loop system has been confirmed to be valid against the break or failure in one-loop piping by a safety evaluation in this study. The DHRS with natural circulation is designed in conformity with the two-loop system by introducing adequate safety designs. In this paper, the validity of this DHRS is given by a probabilistic safety assessment and safety evaluation.