The United States soon may be experiencing a nuclear renaissance. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently announced it had received 17 applications to build 26 new nuclear reactors in the United States and expects to receive five applications for another seven reactors by the end of 2010.
In fact, the proposed expansion of nuclear power isn’t just limited to the United States. All told, organizations have announced plans for the construction of more than 70 new plants around the world.
At ASME, members of the Nuclear Codes and Standards committees are already at work developing new codes and standards and updating existing ones to support the coming nuclear reactor growth spurt.
“There’s a lot of interest in building new plants, and this generates the need to make sure that the code meets the needs of the users,” says Bryan Erler, vice president, ASME Nuclear Codes and Standards.
Much of the committee’s work is being done in support of new technology requirements. While nearly all of the approximately 240 production-ready reactors around the world are light water reactors, Erler says that new types of reactors—and advances in water-cooled reactor technology—need the support of new and updated codes.
“The next wave of reactors that are going to be built are also going to be light water reactors, so we’re updating the codes to meet those particular reactor needs. But the long-term effort is to develop the kind of materials that are required for the high temperature gas-cooled and liquid metal reactors and then the fusion reactors,” says Erler.
Starting three years ago, the committee also became involved in the Multinational Design Evaluation Program (MDEP), an initiative led by the Paris-based Nuclear Energy Agency to harmonize nuclear codes, standards and safety goals among countries using nuclear power. Even though each country has its own set of laws governing the design, construction and operation of nuclear plants, the MDEP will help bring greater consistency to various regulatory agencies’ regulations.
One of the beneficiaries of this effort will be suppliers, who will be able to build components for nuclear facilities that can be used in more that one country without having to make changes to the design or construction of the components.
“When there’s an advancement in one code and we can bring it into strong technological alignment with the other codes, that is a technological consequence. But there also are commercial consequences. Like many things, the nuclear industry is in some respects getting smaller. You have fewer and fewer suppliers around the world and their market is much broader, so having codes that are very closely aligned across national boundaries will help commerce and the industry as a whole,” points out Christian Sanna, ASME staff lead, Nuclear Plant Construction Code.
Another activity underway for ASME is focused on the verification and validation of computer modeling for reactor designs.
“We’ve been approached by the Department of Energy through Idaho National Lab to start looking at standardizing software analysis tools to produce best estimate calculations of challenging new reactor scenarios,” says Ryan Crane, ASME staff lead, Nuclear Inservice Inspection Code. “This document is planned to be used for future reactor designs and also to possibly expand it to other computer modeling applications.”
While ASME already has two verification and validation standards—one for computational solid mechanics and one for computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer—the new standard will be specifically designed for the nuclear industry. It is expected to be released in late 2010.