The construction, ownership, and operation of civilian nuclear power plants are conducted under permanent rules and regulations set out in the Code of Federal Regulations and published in the Federal Register.

Nuclear power is regulated under Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations, which covers all issues of energy. Part 50 of Title 10 covers “Domestic Licensing of Production and Utilization Facilities," and Section 34 of Part 50 is concerned with “Contents of Applications; Technical information.” Paragraph (a) of Section 34, or 10 CFR 50.34(a), states that an application for a nuclear power plant construction permit must include a preliminary safety analysis report (PSAR), and 10 CFR 50.34(b) further specifies that an application for an operator’s license for a nuclear plant must include a final safety analysis report (FSAR).

The PSAR is an accounting of the engineering and operating procedures of a nuclear power plant pertaining to safety features or the handling of emergencies. This specification covers 12 points of nuclear power plant safety:

A A description and safety assessment of the site on which the plant is to be located, the intended power level and an inventory of on-site radioactive materials, a description of unique or unusual safety features of the facility, a description of radiation barriers that will be in place, and an assurance that an individual standing at the outer fence will not receive a hazardous dose of radiation in the event of the worst possible accident.

dioxide into the air. It had a cooling tower, just as any steam-operated plant would have, whether the heat was generated by burning coal or nuclear fission.

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Construction was begun in 1953 on the Calder Hall nuclear plant at Sellafield in Great Britain, and it proved to be a highly reliable power source. It was first connected to the power grid on August 27, 1956, and the plant was formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II on October 17,1956. When it finally closed down on March 31, 2003, the first nuclear plant to

A A summary description of the plant, stressing unusual features and safety considerations.

A The preliminary design of the plant.

A An analysis of the design and performance of the structures, systems, and components of the plant, so that the risk to public health can be assessed. Emphasis is given to the emergency core cooling system, or ECCS.

A An identification of items that are of particular interest for the evaluation of the safety of the plant.

A A plan for the organization of the plant, the training of personnel, and rules for the conduct of operations.

A A description of the quality assurance program.

A An identification of any features of the plant that may require research and development.

A The technical qualifications of the applicant, or the organization applying to build a nuclear plant.

A A discussion of plans for dealing with emergencies.

A A discussion of possible hazards to the structures or components of the plant due to the construction features, and administrative controls that will be in effect during construction.

A Assurance that the plant will be built to withstand an earthquake.

Filing a PSAR is the first step in the paperwork necessary to build a nuclear power plant. From there, the procedure gets complicated.

deliver commercial power had been in constant use for 47 years without incident. Although it generated power, the Calder Hall reactor’s first intention was to produce plutonium for military purposes. This compo­nent of the Calder Hall mission was deleted in 1995, when the United Kingdom ceased nuclear weapons production.

With the success of Calder Hall and Nautilus in the United States, the British government decided to design and build its own submarine reac­tor. The result of the effort was too big to fit in a naval vessel, but the Brit­ish advanced gas-cooled reactor would become another successful public utility power source. The gas-cooled reactor, called “the golf ball” for its round shape, was a step forward in the sophistication of the economical

The Calder Hall Unit 1 at Sellafield, England. This was the first reactor to generate significant electrical power, but its graphite-moderated, gas-cooled design is now considered obsolete.

(Sellafield, Ltd.)

graphite-moderated reactor designs preferred by the British. The coolant was carbon dioxide gas, blown through channels bored in the graphite pile, and it was a good design for safety. The carbon dioxide was nonflam­mable, and it could not flash explosively from liquid to gas, as could water.

With all the effort to keep down the cost of the nuclear-generating plants, the British government found that it still cost 25 percent more to produce power by nuclear means than it cost to burn coal, even given the bonus of plutonium production. The government, seeing a larger picture, decided in 1960 to promote nuclear power as an alternative to coal pro­duction so that all the fortunes of the United Kingdom would not depend

on a single power source. Having an alternate source of electricity on the power grid would give them bargaining power against the coal miners’ unions, which had given them reason to be concerned, beginning with a general coal miners’ strike in 1926. In the longer view, the amount of coal that can be economical extracted in Great Britain is fixed and will not last forever. Nuclear fuel has a much longer life span.

The British nuclear industry built 11 power plants using variations and improvements of the original Calder Hall Magnox reactor. Two Mag­nox reactors were exported, one to Latina, Italy, and one to Tokai Mura, Japan. Nine reactors were built in France looking suspiciously like Brit­ish Magnox designs, and three were built surreptitiously in North Korea using the declassified Calder Hall Magnox blueprints. All of these plants are now shut down. There are now seven nuclear plants operating in the United Kingdom. Six are advanced gas-cooled reactors, based loosely on the Magnox design, but now using enriched uranium oxide fuel. One is a standard Westinghouse pressurized water reactor, as pioneered by the Nautilus submarine program.

In a parallel program of nuclear engineering independence, Can­ada developed its own unique form of nuclear power plant. Great Brit­ain avoided the high cost of building and running uranium enrichment facilities by purposefully designing reactors with high-efficiency graph­ite moderation. Canada wished also to avoid the cost of enrichment but chose heavy water as the high-efficiency moderator. This was the strategy that Germany had hoped to use during World War II, but Canada in the late 1950s assembled a partnership among Atomic Energy of Canada Lim­ited and several private industries. They pooled resources and developed the CANDU, or CANada Deuterium Uranium, power plant.

Unlike the United States, Canada lacked the heavy industry neces­sary to build large steel pressure vessels that are used in pressurized and boiling water reactors. Instead, the heavy water moderator in a CANDU is contained in a low-pressure tank called the calandria, and the fuel is enclosed in small-diameter zirconium tubes. The tubes, which are easy to fabricate, conduct heavy water through the fuel at high temperature and pressure. The Canadian design is thus a pressurized water reactor that uses heavy water in the primary loop, through the fuel, and ordinary or light water through the secondary loop, making steam for the power — turbines. Refueling, which must be frequent due to the low U-235 content, is accomplished by automatic machines, pushing new fuel through one end of the reactor and catching it as it falls out the other.

British Gas-Cooled MAGNOX Reactor

Charge tubes Control rods Radiation shielding Pressure vessel Graphite moderator Fuel rods

Hot gas duct

Steam

Heat exchanger

Water circulator

Water Cool gas duct Gas circulator

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The internal workings of a British gas-cooled MAGNOX reactor

The first CANDU was built in 1962 in Rolphton, Ontario, and it ran for 25 years at low power, proving the concept of a heavy water power reactor. A second CANDU was built at Douglas Point in 1968, and further expan­sion in Canada and foreign sales have put 29 CANDU reactors in opera­tion. There are 17 in Canada, and there are also CANDU reactors operating in South Korea, China, India, Argentina, Romania, and Pakistan. India has built 13 CANDU-derivative power plants without Canadian assistance.

A disadvantage to the CANDU design is the high cost of construction and building materials. Heavy water of sufficient purity costs about $1 per gram, and several metric tons are required in one reactor. As is the case with most nuclear reactor designs, the capital cost of building the power plant is 65 percent of the lifetime cost of producing power, with the cost of the fuel being less than 10 percent.

Other reactor designs have been tried with less success. Experimental reactors using plutonium-breeder technology or liquid-metal coolants, while having interesting potential for an economy in which uranium is not available, have proven less than practical for commercial power

production. Some designs, such as the infamous Soviet RBMK graphite pile, have a lack of inherent safety characteristic and are being phased out as the plants reach the end of operating life. In general, the pressurized water reactors (PWRs) have proven to be the preferred design for practical power sourcing, with the boiling water reactor (BWR) a second choice. Japan, with 55 nuclear reactors in 17 power plants, is representative of the international commitment to alternative base power supplies. Of these 17 power plants, four were knocked out of commission by the Tohoku earthquake of 2011. One, the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Station, was too damaged to be brought back into service.

France, where approximately 80 percent of the national electrical power is produced by nuclear fission, has 16 nuclear power plants, mostly PWRs. Frances fast breeder reactor, the Superphoenix Nuclear Power Station, has the distinction of being the only commercial power plant to come under rocket attack by an eco-pacifist group. In 1982, five exploding warheads were fired into the reactor containment building using a Soviet-made rocket launcher. Credit for the attack was taken by the Swiss Green Party. The Superphoenix was shut down in 1997 because of nagging problems with the 6,063 tons (5,500 metric tons) of liquid sodium coolant leaking onto the floor.

Germany has 14 nuclear power plants, Russia has 10, and the United States has 51. A power plant usually has more than one reactor, and in the

United States there are 104 reactors. Nuclear plants in the United States produce just under 20 percent of the total electricity used by consum­ers. The lone sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor in the United States

commercial power grid, Fermi I near Monroe, Michigan, suffered a melt­down in 1966 and proved too expensive to be of practical use.

A single nuclear plant can produce as little continuous power as 137 megawatts by the KANUPP reactor in Pakistan or as much as 5,700 mega­watts by the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine. There are modest components of the national power supply dedicated to nuclear methods in Finland, Hungary, Brazil, Mexico, Bulgaria, Argentina, the Philippines, Romania, and South Africa. Spain has an impressive eight nuclear power plants, Sweden three, and Switzerland four.