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Conference on Nuclear Training and Education: A Biennial International Forum (CONTE 2025)
February 3–6, 2025
Amelia Island, FL|Omni Amelia Island Resort
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A series of firsts delivers new Plant Vogtle units
Southern Nuclear was first when no one wanted to be.
The nuclear subsidiary of the century-old utility Southern Company, based in Atlanta, Ga., joined a pack of nuclear companies in the early 2000s—during what was then dubbed a “nuclear renaissance”—bullish on plans for new large nuclear facilities and adding thousands of new carbon-free megawatts to the grid.
In 2008, Southern Nuclear applied for a combined construction and operating license (COL), positioning the company to receive the first such license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2012. Also in 2008, Southern became the first U.S. company to sign an engineering, procurement, and construction contract for a Generation III+ reactor. Southern chose Westinghouse’s AP1000 pressurized water reactor, which was certified by the NRC in December 2011.
Fast forward a dozen years—which saw dozens of setbacks and hundreds of successes—and Southern Nuclear and its stakeholders celebrated the completion of Vogtle Units 3 and 4: the first new commercial nuclear power construction project completed in the U.S. in more than 30 years.
James T. Waber, Mary Repar Kline, Leah K. Johnson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 4 | Number 3 | September 1958 | Pages 341-353
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE58-A25533
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The effect of alloying on the amount of plutonium required in forming a critical mass of each alloy has been expressed in terms of an inventory requirement ratio, RI. This quantity was obtained for twenty-seven potential alloying elements at three compositional levels. The effectiveness of using Vegard’s law to estimate the density of the alloys was appraised by comparing the estimated densities and RI values of nine intermetallic compounds with their x-ray densities and the RI values computed from them. The parametric variation of RI with fT, the number of excess neutrons per collision was also studied.
