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From Capitol Hill: Nuclear is back, critical for America’s energy future
The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy convened its first hearing of the year, “American Energy Dominance: Dawn of the New Nuclear Era,” on January 7, where lawmakers and industry leaders discussed how nuclear energy can help meet surging electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence, data centers, advanced manufacturing, and national security needs.
Edouard Hourcade (CEA), Takatsugu Mihara (JAEA), , Alexandre Dauphin, Jean-François Dirat (Framatome), Akihiro Ide (MFBR)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 556-561
ASTRID (Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration) has the objective to integrate innovative options with the objective to prepare the 4th generation reactors.
In this framework a French-Japanese agreement was signed in 2014 between CEA, framatome (ex AREVA NP), JAEA, MHI/MFBR to jointly perform components design of ASTRID such as Decay Heat Removal Systems (DHRS).
In this respect an ambitious close collaboration is set in the framework of the practical elimination objective of Decay Heat Removal (DHR) function loss which is one of the main ASTRID safety objectives.
To reach this target, design is driven by deterministic safety criteria, probabilistic safety indicators and proper technical and economic analysis.
Safety demonstration aims at identifying common cause failures and imposes to search for proper diversification of decay heat removal systems. In ASTRID, DHRS main diversification is based on final heat sinks types and intermediate coolant fluids. It is also based on spatial segregation of systems which leads to thermal loading diversification during normal operation as well as severe accident exposure. Implication of two different designers bodies framatome and a Japanese team (JAEA, Mitsubishi FBR Systems (MFBR) and MHI) also participate to diversification.
This paper is giving an update concerning ASTRID DHR strategy with description of reference architecture evolution and project objectives. In particular, new developments were made for DHR during normal shutdown and role of Ex-Vessel system. A special focus is made on design process of automatic shutter to hydraulically connect Hot Plenum and cold plenum to enhance primary vessel natural convection.