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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.
Rohan Biwalkar, Sola Talabi (Pittsburgh Technical)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 985-988
An Integrated Small Modular Reactor is an Integral Pressurized-Water Reactor (iPWR) with a relatively high surface-area-to-volume ratio. It has been hypothesized that a higher surface-area-to-volume ratio aids passive aerosol decontamination through various deposition phenomena, namely thermophoresis, diffusiophoresis and gravitational settling. Accordingly, particle deposition was studied within a range of thermal-hydraulic parameters, namely pressure, temperature and A/V ratios, in the presence as well as the absence of steam. It was found that an overall convective flow exists inside the Containment Vessel (CV) volume, originating due to fluid buoyancy and the temperature gradient between the Reactor Vessel (RV) and Containment Vessel walls. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations confirmed the existence of this convective flow, and it has experimentally been identified as a major particle transport mechanism. The convective flow also aids particle deposition due to turbulent inertial impaction on the walls. The flow velocities are at least an order of magnitude higher than the deposition velocities by phoretic phenomena; this significantly enhances the importance of the convective flow in contributing to particle transport during post-accident conditions in iPWRs.