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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.
Dirk Wilhelm, Leonhard Meyer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | October 1985 | Pages 162-172
Technical Paper | Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33717
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The flow dynamics in the upper core structure (UCS) during the expansion phase of a liquid-metal fast breeder reactor core disruptive accident were investigated experimentally and numerically. A simulant material experiment was designed to verify some of the thermal-hydraulic models in SIMMER-II. The experiments showed the large effect of the heat transfer in the UCS and the relatively small effect of friction. The reduction of the work potential of the expanding fuel by the presence of the UCS is shown as a function of the initial pressure and the temperature difference between the core and the UCS, both for simulant materials and UO2 fuel. It is described how the experimental data can be extrapolated to prototypical conditions, which phenomena modeled in the code predictions of SIMMER-II are different for simulant and prototypical transients, and how the experimental results compare to effects of prototypical phenomena that could not be modeled in the experiment.
