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Swiss nuclear power and the case for long-term operation
Designed for 40 years but built to last far longer, Switzerland’s nuclear power plants have all entered long-term operation. Yet age alone says little about safety or performance. Through continuous upgrades, strict regulatory oversight, and extensive aging management, the country’s reactors are being prepared for decades of continued operation, in line with international practice.
Taisuke Yonomoto, Yutaka Kukita, Richard R. Schultz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 124 | Number 1 | October 1998 | Pages 18-30
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2906
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The passive residual heat removal (PRHR) system in the Westinghouse AP600 advanced passive reactor design is a natural-circulation-driven heat exchanger cooled by the water in the in-containment refueling water storage tank (IRWST). During the experiments, which simulated small-break loss-of-coolant accidents in the AP600 reactor using the ROSA-V Large-Scale Test Facility (LSTF), the PRHR system heat removal rates well exceeded the core decay power soon after the actuation of the PRHR. This resulted in continuous cooldown and depressurization of the primary side. The PRHR heat transfer performance in these experiments was analyzed by applying heat transfer correlations available in literature to the PRHR heat exchanger tube bundle. Also, the three-dimensional natural circulation in the IRWST was simulated numerically using the FLUENT code. The total heat transfer rate of the PRHR was predicted within 5% of the measured value. The fluid temperature distribution in the IRWST was also predicted well except that the elevation of the thermally stratified region was underpredicted. The calculated flow pattern in the IRWST suggests that the atypical IRWST geometry in the LSTF may have affected the PRHR heat transfer performance during the experiments only a little.