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Two steps forward for U.K. advanced nuclear
This week, two significant announcements have emerged from the United Kingdom’s advanced reactor sector.
On June 14, Rolls-Royce, the United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory, and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency announced that they had signed two trilateral memorandums of cooperation to collaborate on “advanced modular reactor (AMR) technology, specifically high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGR), and the coated particle fuel these reactors will use.”
Separately, on June 16, Bellevue, Wash.–based TerraPower announced that its Natrium reactor design has been formally submitted for U.K. regulatory review. The company also announced the formation of a new subsidiary, TerraPower UK Ltd.
Shinji Matsushita, Masafumi Nojima (Hitachi), Takeshi Sakai, Tadashi Fujii (Hitachi-Ge Nuclear)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 1098-1104
Corium cooling system plays an important role to prevent the interaction between the molten corium and concrete of a pedestal region. As the material for constituting the corium cooling system, zirconia-based refractory materials are promising due to its high melting points and chemical stabilities. To estimate the erosion depth of the refractory material in the severe accidents, we developed an interaction model for molten corium and zirconia refractory material based on the erosion mechanism. Our developed model were based on two main phenomena; reduction reaction of the zirconia refractory material and oxygen diffusion in the zirconia. On the interface of the molten corium, oxygen in the zirconia are extracted by the reduction reaction. On the other hand, in the zirconia, oxygen are transferred to the interface according to Fick's laws of diffusion because the reduction reactions induce concentration gradient of oxygen in the zirconia. Thus, the erosion rate of the zirconia are governed by the reduction reaction and oxygen diffusion. We modeled the erosion behaviors as three phase: (1) just reduction reaction phase, (2) transitional erosion phase, (3) steady erosion phase. As a result, we found that our model grasp the trend of the erosion behaviors. As the future works, we require to investigate the temperature dependency of the reduction reaction rate to evaluate more accurately.