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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.
C. V. Chester, R. O. Chester
Nuclear Technology | Volume 21 | Number 3 | March 1974 | Pages 190-200
Technical Paper | Reactor Siting | doi.org/10.13182/NT74-A31389
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A pot-type Liquid-Metal-Cooled Fast Breeder Reactor was analyzed as a civil defense problem in a nuclear attack. In order for the core inventory of fission products to add significantly to casualties, they must be promptly released from the reactor structure due to blast from the weapon, and added to the fallout. The analysis of the interaction of weapon effects with the significant elements of the structure surrounding the reactors was checked by high explosive tests on scale models. It is concluded that for prompt ejection of the core, a megaton-range weapon must be detonated close enough so that the reactor is in the crater, or that an air shock greater than 170 atm impacts at near normal incidence the fueling cell wall crossing the sodium tank. For megaton weapons, delivery accuracy substantially exceeding that ascribed to deployed strategic delivery systems would be required.