Enrico Fermi nuclear power plant

The more familiar sodium-cooled reactor is the liquid metal-cooled fast-breeder reactor (LMFBR). The Enrico Fermi nuclear power plant was built in Lagoona Beach, Michigan, in 1966. The reactor operated at 61 MWe unhl 1972. Reactors of this type have the advantage of operating at relatively low pressure. 

The 300 MW(e) pressurized water reactor of ANSALDO-NIRA is based on WESTINGHOUSE design and uses the "Enrico Fermi" nuclear power plant sited at Trlno Vercelese in Italy as reference plant. 

The reactor that first succeeded in generating electricity was not the LWR, which has been commercialized, but the FR. Thereafter in the USA, many FRs such as the Enrico Fermi Atomic Power Plant, EBR-II and FFTF were constructed and operated. Test data have been accumulated from these reactors through R D for core fuel, structural materials, neutronic characteristics of core, safety, and so on. CRBR with 380 MWe power output passed the safety review in 1975, and the construction began. However, the nuclear policy changed during President Carter s administration, and the constmction was called off. 

There have been two major accidents (Three Mile Island in the United States and Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union) in which control was lost in nuclear power plants, with subsequent rapid increases in fission rates that resulted in steam explosions and releases of radioactivity. The protective shield of reinforced concrete, which surrounded the Three Mile Island Reactor, prevented release of any radioactivity into the environment. In the Russian accident there had been no containment shield, and, when the steam explosion occurred, fission products plus uranium were released to the environment—in the immediate vicinity and then carried over the Northern Hemisphere, in particular over large areas of Eastern Europe. Much was learned from these accidents and the new generations of reactors are being built to be passive safe. In such passive reactors, when the power level increases toward an unsafe level, the reactor turns off automatically to prevent the high-energy release that would cause the explosive release of radioactivity. Such a design is assumed to remove a major factor of safety concern in reactor operation, see also Bohr, Niels Fermi, Enrico AIan-HATTAN Project Plutonium Radioactivity Uranium. 

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