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NN Asks: Is the U.S. ready for nuclear construction to accelerate?
Craig Stover
Yes, but . . .
The United States is better positioned today for nuclear construction than it has been in decades. Some of that comes from the experience gained at Vogtle and V.C. Summer. I was part of the team that helped start the V.C. Summer project in 2008, and at that time we were trying to build a nuclear construction workforce from scratch. We learned a lot through that effort, and many of those lessons learned have since been studied, documented, and shared.
The nuclear industry is also benefiting from the wave of investment that started growing around 2020. Over the last five or six years, there has been a serious effort across the country to get ready for new nuclear builds. The U.S. government and the private sector are investing billions of dollars in new nuclear. Much of that work is happening before widespread commercial deployment contracts are signed. This is real, and we need to prepare.
Michael T. Itamura, Nicholas D. Francis, Jr., Stephen W. Webb, Darryl L. James
Nuclear Technology | Volume 148 | Number 2 | November 2004 | Pages 115-124
Technical Paper | High-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT04-A3552
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Yucca Mountain has been designated as the nation's high-level radioactive waste repository, and the U.S. Department of Energy has been approved to apply to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to construct a repository. The temperature and humidity inside the emplacement drift will affect the degradation rate of the waste packages and waste forms as well as the quantity of water available to transport dissolved radionuclides out of the waste canister. Thermal radiation and turbulent natural convection are the main modes of heat transfer inside the drift. This paper presents the result of three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics simulations of a segment of emplacement drift. The model contained the three main types of waste packages and was run at the time that the peak waste package temperatures are expected. Results show that thermal radiation is the dominant mode of heat transfer inside the drift. Natural convection affects the variation in surface temperature on the hot waste packages and can account for a large fraction of the heat transfer for the colder waste packages. The paper also presents the sensitivity of model results to uncertainties in several input parameters. The sensitivity study shows that the uncertainty in peak waste package temperatures due to in-drift parameters is <3°C.
