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Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
N. Bekris, E. Hutter, J. Rodolausse
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 1009-1013
Purification and Chemical Process | Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology Tsukuba, Japan November 12-16, 2001 | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A22736
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Helium Cooled Pebble Bed (HCPB) Breeder Test Blanket concept of ITER will comprise 3 He circuits for the heat extraction, the coolant purification and the tritium removal generated by nuclear reactions in the lithium orthosilicate. Tritium production in the orthosilicate will inevitably also produce some tritiated water which should be removed from the helium purge gas stream before the extraction of tritium (mainly HT) by passing it through a liquid nitrogen cooled molecular sieve bed. To minimise the amount of adsorbed water in the molecular sieve beds a cryogenic cold trap (CT) will be included in the tritium extraction system (TES). The expected water concentration in this gas stream is of the order of 10 ppm by volume.A cold trap in a technical scale (1/6 of the ITER operating conditions) with design features meeting the requirements for water vapour trapping, i.e. variable cool-down rates and low velocity of the working gas, was used to investigate the water removal efficiency. In this paper we describe the first results obtained with small He throughputs as well as recent results obtained for medium and high He flow rates containing water vapour ranging from 10 to 16 ppmv.