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NRC approves TerraPower construction permit
Today, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it has approved TerraPower’s construction permit application for Kemmerer Unit 1, the company’s first deployment of Natrium, its flagship sodium fast reactor.
This approval is a significant milestone on three fronts. For TerraPower, it represents another step forward in demonstrating its technology. For the Department of Energy, it reflects progress (despite delays) for the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP). For the NRC, it is the first approval granted to a commercial reactor in nearly a decade—and the first approval of a commercial non–light water reactor in more than 40 years.
Kenji Arai, Seijiro Suzuki, Mikihide Nakamaru, Hideaki Heki
Nuclear Technology | Volume 143 | Number 1 | July 2003 | Pages 1-10
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3393
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The long operating cycle simplified boiling water reactor is a reactor concept that pursues both safety and the economy by employing a natural circulation reactor core without a refueling, a passive decay heat removal, and an integrated building for the reactor and turbine. Throughout the entire spectrum of the design basis accident, the reactor core is kept covered by the passive emergency core cooling system. The decay heat is removed by the conventional active low-pressure residual heat removal system. As for a postulated severe accident, the suppression pool water floods the lower part of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) in the case when core damage occurs, and the in-vessel retention that keeps the melt inside the RPV is achieved by supplying the coolant. The containment adopts a parallel-double-steel-plate structure similar to a hull structure, which contains coolant between the inner and outer walls to absorb the heat transferred from the inside of the containment. Consequently, the containment structure functions as a passive containment cooling system (PCCS) to remove the decay heat in case of an accident. This paper describes the PCCS performance evaluation by using TRAC code to show one of the characteristic plant features. The core damage frequency for internal events was also evaluated to examine the safety level of the plant and to show the adequacy of the safety system design.