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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.
Michitsugu Mori
Nuclear Technology | Volume 128 | Number 2 | November 1999 | Pages 205-215
Technical Paper | RETRAN | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A3025
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The advanced boiling water reactor (ABWR) has ten reactor-internal pumps peripherally mounted on the bottom of a reactor vessel. Analytical simulation of reactor-internal pumps unique to the ABWR requires new modeling because of the difference in core flow characteristics between the reactor-internal pumps and the two external-recirculation pumps of the primary outer loops with the jet pumps in a current boiling water reactor. Efforts in this work focused on modeling and simulation of reactor-internal pumps and core flow of the ABWR, using the RETRAN-3D code, the computer program for transient thermal-hydraulic analysis of a complex fluid flow system, without multidimensional kinetics. Included are modeling of the core and reactor pressure vessel with ten reactor-internal pumps, and simulation of the events of reactor-internal-pumps trip during the startup-phase tests, which are unable to be done in the simulation of a current BWR. Sensitivity analyses on the recirculation flow control and the slip model were also performed. The predictions by the RETRAN-3D code successfully tracked the measured data of reactor-internal-pump trip during the startup-phase test. The present analytical simulations could demonstrate the validation of the RETRAN-3D code applicable to the ABWR with the pump model of reactor-internal pumps in the program.