Eshelman Summary of NR Program Prometheus Efforts

Description

LM-05K188, February 8, 2006, 28 s.The Naval Reactors Program led work on the development of a reactor plant system for the Prometheus spacereactor program. The work centered on a 200 kWe electric reactor plant with a 15-20 year mission applicable to nuclearelectric propulsion (NEP). After a review of all reactor and energy conversion alternatives, a direct gas Brayton reactor plantwas selected for further development. The work performed subsequent to this selection included preliminary nuclear reactorand reactor plant design, development of instrumentation and control techniques, modeling reactor plant operationalfeatures, development and testing of core and plant material options, and development of an overall project plan. Prior torestructuring of the program, substantial progress had been made on defining reference plant operating conditions, definingreactor mechanical, thermal and nuclear performance, understanding the capabilities and uncertainties provided by materialalternatives, and planning non-nuclear and nuclear system testing. The mission requirements for the envisioned NEPmissions cannot be accommodated with existing reactor technologies. Therefore concurrent design, development andtesting would be needed to deliver a functional reactor system. Fuel and material performance beyond the current state ofthe art is needed. There is very little national infrastructure available for fast reactor nuclear testing and associated materialsdevelopment and testing. Surface mission requirements may be different enough to warrant different reactor designapproaches and development of a generic multi-purpose reactor requires substantial sacrifice in performance capability foreach mission.