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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.
Satoshi Sato, Hideyuki Takatsu, Yasushi Seki, Toshihisa Utsumi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 30 | Number 3 | December 1996 | Pages 1129-1133
Neutronics Experiments and Analyses | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A11963100
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Shielding analyses of the inboard blanket, the vacuum vessel and the Toroidal Field Coil (TFC) in International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor OTTER) were performed by Monte Carlo and 2-dimensional discrete ordinate methods taking the radiation streaming through the 20 mm wide gap between the adjacent blanket modules into account, and their peak nuclear responses were evaluated The nuclear responses of the TFC could fully satisfy the radiation limits. On the other hand, the helium production rates of the branch pipe, the leg and the front surface of the vacuum vessel behind the gap were about 2-3 times higher than the radiation limit at the end of the operation, i.e. the neutron fluence of 3 MWa/m2. So the shielding module is required to be increased by 80 mm to satisfy the radiation limit. Also, shielding analyses for 20 - 100 mm wide gaps were performed, and it was found that the gap width could be increased by up to 50 mm from the TFCs protection for their peak nuclear responses point of view.