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Nuclear Installations Safety
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2025 ANS Annual Conference
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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
Hongping Sun, Jian Deng, Dahuan Zhu, Yapei Zhang, Wenxi Tian, Suizheng Qiu, G. H. Su
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 10 | October 2020 | Pages 1481-1493
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1713672
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Sodium combustion oxide aerosols are the main carriers of radioactive materials in a sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) during sodium fire accidents. Therefore, it is of great significance to simulate aerosol behavior in sodium pool fires to evaluate radioactive source terms in the containment or environment. In this work, a numerical method has been developed to simulate sodium oxide aerosol behavior during sodium pool fires. The Classical Nucleation Theory has been taken into account to simulate gas-to-particle conversion (GPC). The model has been evaluated theoretically in 280 cases with three main parameters: sodium pool temperature, pool diameter, and oxygen concentration. The correlation established by fitting data points is associated with the sodium evaporation rate. The SFA code has been developed based on advanced sodium pool combustion and aerosol models coupled with GPC correlations. In comparison with the experimental data, the code-calculated average atmospheric temperature, airborne aerosol concentration, and particle size are in good agreement with the data, which indicate that the method is reliable and can be applied in code development in the future.
