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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.
G. Th. Analytis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 146 | Number 2 | May 2004 | Pages 99-121
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT04-A3491
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Seven tight-lattice NEPTUN-III bottom-flooding experiments are analyzed by using the frozen version of RELAP5, RELAP5/MOD3.3/BETA. This work is part of the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) contribution to the High Performance Light Water Reactor (HPLWR) European Union project and aims at assessing the capabilities of the code to model the reflooding phenomena in a tight hexagonal lattice (which was one of the core geometries considered at the time for an HPLWR) following a hypothetical loss-of-coolant accident scenario. Even though the latest version of the code has as a default the new PSI reflood model developed by the author, which was tested and assessed against reflooding data obtained at standard light water reactor lattices, this work shows that for tight lattices, the code underpredicts the peak clad temperatures measured during a series of reflooding experiments performed at the NEPTUN-III tight-lattice heater rod bundle facility. The reasons for these differences are discussed, and the (possible) changes needed in the framework of RELAP5/MOD3.3 for improving the modeling of reflooding in tight lattices are investigated.
