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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
Anh-Tuan Cao, Thanh-Tuan Tran, Thi-Hong-Xuyen Nguyen, Dookie Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 5 | May 2020 | Pages 743-757
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1696643
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper proposes a simplified approach for assessing and predicting the seismic risks for electrical cabinets in nuclear power plants (NPPs). The method is a combination of fragility analysis and cumulative absolute velocity (CAV) analysis. First, the high confidence of low probability of failure points from the fragility curves are defined to determine the capacity of the cabinet. Then, the potential damage to the electrical cabinet at different locations in Korea is considered via probabilistic seismic maps. Based on the capacity, a seismic risk assessment is conducted to observe the operant condition or predict the potential issues of the electrical cabinet under seismic effects.
An electrical cabinet is used as a setting for numerical simulation. The finite element model is validated against the experimental results and calibrated by using response surface methodology. Numerical results show that the operant condition of the electrical cabinet can be disturbed by probable earthquakes that have CAV values greater than the of 0.27 g‧s. This method is one way that NPP operators can follow to obtain cabinet safety regulations.
