A passive spray cooling concept for reactor containments
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (United States)
Innovative reactor designers have identified the benefits of wetting the outer containment wall to remove postaccident decay heat. in particular, Westinghouse is in the process of qualifying the effectiveness of spray cooling in experiments carried out for their AP600 reactor containment design. The work reported here was a small subset of a project supported by the Electric Power Research Institute on passive containment cooling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was concerned with evaluation of the use of inherent means, other than gravity, to effect delivery of coolant to external or internal containment spray systems. A schematic of the basic concept is shown in Fig. 1. A low-boiling-point fluid within a container either inside, or in good external thermal contact with, the containment evaporates to pressurize an external water tank when the containment internal temperature rises sufficiently. This pumps the water to spray nozzles atop the containment. Variations using solid or gaseous substances are also possible, as surveyed in Table 1, segregated into {open_quotes}fully{close_quotes} and {open_quotes}semi{close_quotes} passive categories, where the latter require an active signal to initiate operation; for that reason they were excluded from further, more detailed evaluation.
- OSTI ID:
- 89318
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-941102-; ISSN 0003-018X; TRN: 95:004215-0395
- Journal Information:
- Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Vol. 71; Conference: Winter meeting of the American Nuclear Society (ANS), Washington, DC (United States), 13-18 Nov 1994; Other Information: PBD: 1994
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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