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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Ruxandra P. Golinescu, Mujid S. Kazimi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1994 | Pages 512-516
Fusion Material and Plasma-Facing Component | Proceedings of the Eleventh Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy New Orleans, Louisiana June 19-23, 1994 | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A40208
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Defining a methodology for a reliability estimate of the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) divertor is the objective of the study summarized in this paper. If ITER could be designed such that no transients of any type occurred, the divertor reliability would be controlled by erosion of material during normal operation. The occurrence of several transient events results in important contribution to the expected divertor failure rate. Some transients cause the temperature in the divertor plate (DP) to rise; if these temperatures get too high, the structural elements in the DP will weaken and subsequently suffer structural failure and possibly reach the melting temperature. Using the limited data available leads to the result that there is a high probability that the DP will reliably withstand a peak heat flux of 11 MW/m2. However, transient events will lead to a much shorter lifetime than desirable for DP's, mainly due to the expected severe effects of plasma disruptions. If transients occurred, but the shutdown mechanism succeeded to perform without inducing a disruption, divertor reliability could be significantly improved. Improved characterization of the disruption conditions, and enlarged scope of failure modes should be pursued to gain confidence in the present conclusions.
