NERHP Gets $6 Million to Build Next Generation Nuclear Facility

Story Posted: Tue, Oct 21, 2008

With 12 faculty and just over 200 students, OSU’s Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics (NERHP) isn’t the largest nuke department in the country but it has an international reputation for innovative work and productive collaboration.

That reputation, plus previous experience building large-scale test facilities, impressed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) who recently awarded the department $6 million to build a one-quarter scale High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor test facility (HTGR) — the only one of its kind in the nation.

“The NRC trusts us to get the job done and the product out,” says Brian Woods, Assistant Professor and team leader on the project.

In a five-year cooperative agreement with the NRC, OSU will spend a year designing the facility, a year building it, and another year “shaking it down,” says Woods. “You have to characterize it and put it through its paces.” The real testing and data collection will begin the fourth year.

Several universities have small, bench-top HTGR models but they are only good at measuring one specific aspect of operation. Conversely, full-scale commercial reactors don’t include enough instrumentation for testing.

Although not a real reactor (it uses electricity not nuclear fuel), the OSU test facility will be ideal for measuring many different phenomena and how they interact. “The great thing about the facility we are building,” says Woods, “is we can instrument the heck out of it. We can put in lots of sensors. We can measure flow rate, heat fluxes -- anything they might want, we can do.”

As world energy needs increase, the demand for economical power plants that operate with minimal impact on the environment is huge. High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactors operate at 1,000 degrees centigrade, have high levels of burn-up, and create 50% less radioactive waste than conventional reactors. They are also less expensive to build and, because fuel is dispersed among hundreds of thousands of separate spheres, they won’t melt down.

Two different designs for HTGRs are under active development in Japan, China, South Africa, and the United States. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects to receive design submissions from U.S. companies in the near future. To prepare for these potential applications, the agency is assessing, and if needed, updating its infrastructure.

That’s where OSU comes into the picture. The NRC needs real-world data to evaluate the ability of computer models to accurately assess the safety aspects of the reactor designs; the NERHP quarter-scale test facility will provide that data.

NERHP did similar work for the NRC with its AP600 Pressurized Water Reactor (APEX). “The NRC was happy with the work we did with our APEX test facility,” says Woods. “We have a very good reputation for doing this kind of work.”