An Innovative Hybrid Loop-Pool Design for Sodium Cooled Fast Reactor

Conference · Thu Nov 01 04:00:00 EDT 2007

OSTI ID:923496

Zhao, Haihua; Zhang, Hongbin

The existing sodium cooled fast reactors (SFR) have two types of designs – loop type and pool type. In the loop type design, such as JOYO (Japan) [1] and MONJU (Japan), the primary coolant is circulated through intermediate heat exchangers (IHX) external to the reactor tank. The major advantages of loop design include compactness and easy maintenance. The disadvantage is higher possibility of sodium leakage. In the pool type design such as EBR-II (USA), BN-600M(Russia), Superphénix (France) and European Fast Reactor [2], the reactor core, primary pumps, IHXs and direct reactor auxiliary cooling system (DRACS) heat exchangers (DHX) all are immersed in a pool of sodium coolant within the reactor vessel, making a loss of primary coolant extremely unlikely. However, the pool type design makes primary system large. In the latest ANL’s Advanced Burner Test Reactor (ABTR) design [3], the primary system is configured in a pool-type arrangement. The hot sodium at core outlet temperature in hot pool is separated from the cold sodium at core inlet temperature in cold pool by a single integrated structure called Redan. Redan provides the exchange of the hot sodium from hot pool to cold pool through IHXs. The IHXs were chosen as the traditional tube-shell design. This type of IHXs is large in size and hence large reactor vessel is needed.

• Research Organization: Idaho National Laboratory (INL)
• Sponsoring Organization: DOE - NE
• DOE Contract Number: AC07-99ID13727
• OSTI ID: 923496
• Report Number(s): INL/CON-07-12657
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS
BURNERS
COOLANTS
COOLING SYSTEMS
DESIGN
FAST REACTORS
HEAT EXCHANGERS
MAINTENANCE
REACTOR CORES
REACTOR VESSELS
SFR
Hybrid Loop-Pool
SODIUM
TEST REACTORS