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Preliminary white safety finding at Comanche Peak prompts NRC conference
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a regulatory conference Tuesday, May 19, with Vistra Operations Company officials to discuss a preliminary “white” safety finding at Comanche Peak-2.
Jin Jiang, Chao Zhang, Binggang Cui (The Univ of Western Ontario)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1406-1415
Supercritical water-cooled reactor (SCWR) has very unique characteristics which are very different from traditional nuclear power plants. Even though there are many advantages associated with this new technology, it does pose several unique circumstances that one has not encountered in traditional reactors. Major differences are: the higher power density; higher operating temperature and pressure; and lack of steam generator to isolate the reactor from balanced of the plant so that a load variation can back-propagated to the rector system. These unique characteristics call for advanced control systems to ensure safety and operational efficiency. In this paper, a Supercritical Fossil-fired Power Plant has been analyzed in terms of dynamic interactions among different parts of the plant, and also modes of operation. Differences between Supercritical Fossil-fired Power Plant and Supercritical Water-cooled Reactor based plant have been analyzed. The results of analysis have indicated that advanced coordination control systems have to be used in order to ensure safe operation of the reactor as well as the entire plant.