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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
Jean-Christophe Lecoy, Jean-Yves Sauvage, Camille Charignon
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1567-1577
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1580528
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Combined approaches are now applied in safety analyses of design-basis accidents. They consist of using best-estimate models in the computer codes together with their estimated uncertainties, and require the most unfavorable initial and boundary conditions (IBCs) to be found with respect to the plant operating conditions. This implies determining first the worst-case scenarios, then predicting the figures of merit (FOMs) that must fulfill safety criteria. Such scenarios can be identified by sensitivity studies on IBCs resulting in an input vector of fixed values to realize a deterministic bounding calculation. However, it is a difficult and time-consuming iterative task especially for complex transients with interactions between parameters. Alternatively, the RIPS (Reduction of the Interval of variation of the Parameters of the Scenario) method has been developed in a best-estimate plus uncertainty approach to find the worst IBCs as a set of reduced ranges of variation of the related inputs, rather than by a vector of discrete values. It defines a critical zone for which the FOM is maximized (or minimized). To this end the RIPS method provides quantitative and graphical outcomes enabling identification of the detrimental (or favorable) ranges of variation of the preponderant IBC parameters. This is done through a statistical analysis of a large set of calculations in which all the input parameters and code model uncertainties are randomly sampled. The RIPS method analyzes the higher (or lower) quantiles of the FOM cumulative density function and determines for each input parameter the critical zone within its variation interval, i.e., where it is the most influential. Correlations between parameters are also detected. This paper describes the RIPS method and demonstrates with several examples its ability to adequately identify the critical zone of the IBC configuration space.