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MARVEL team shares lessons learned through microreactor development
On June 1 at the American Nuclear Society’s Annual Conference in Denver, Colo., a team from Idaho National Laboratory presented a session titled “Lessons Learned from MARVEL Reactor Fabrication.” The presentation highlighted challenges that arose as they moved from design to manufacturing and assembly, with a focus on reactor part fabrication, Stirling engine implementation, and reactivity control system development.
Jong Ho Lee, Soon Heung Chang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 76 | Number 1 | January 1987 | Pages 27-40
Technical Paper | Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT87-A33894
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A small-break loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) caused by a stuck-open power-operated relief valve is one of the important contributors to nuclear power plant risk. A pressurizer surveillance system was designed to use a microcomputer to prevent the malfunction of the system; the effect of this improvement has been assessed through probabilistic risk assessment. The microcomputer diagnoses the malfunction of the system by a process-checking method and automatically performs the backup action related to each malfunction. This improvement means that we can correctly diagnose “spurious opening,” “failure to reclose,” and “small-break LOCA,” which are difficult for operators to diagnose quickly and correctly, and by taking automatic backup action we can reduce the probability of human error.