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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.
I. E. Knudsen, H. E. Hootman and N. M. Levitz
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 20 | Number 3 | November 1964 | Pages 259-265
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE64-A19567
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This new, dry process employs fluidization and particle-coating techniques and involves direct conversion of uranium hexafluoride to a solid, (uranyl fluoride), by hydrolysis with steam followed by reduction of the uranyl fluoride to the dioxide by reaction with steam-hydrogen mixtures. Process studies were carried out in 3-in.-diameter Monel reactors. The uranium-hexafluoride/steam reaction was conducted continuously at relatively low temperatures, about 200 C, at a uranium hexafluoride rate equivalent to 174 lb uranium h-1 ft-2 of reactor cross section and a steam rate of about 3.25 times the stoichiometric requirement. Seed addition was required to offset particle-growth effects. Uranium losses to the off-gas were less than 0.01% of the hexafluoride fed. Reduction of the uranyl fluoride to the oxide was demonstrated in batch tests. Low-fluoride (<250 parts/106 residual) material was consistently produced in four hours at 650 C and in seven hours at 600 C using a 50:50 mixture of steam and hydrogen. Pellet-fabrication tests on dioxide powders ground to -325 mesh gave sintered densities of about 94% of theoretical.