UC Berkeley

The Pebble Bed Advanced High Temperature Reactor (PB-AHTR) is a pebble fueled, liquid salt cooled, high temperature nuclear reactor design that can be used for electricity generation or other applications requiring the availability of heat at elevated temperatures. A stage in the design evolution of this plant requires the analysis of the plant during a variety of potential transients to understand the primary and safety cooling system response. This study focuses on the performance of the passive safety cooling system with a dual purpose, to assess the capacity to maintain the core at safe temperatures and to assist the design process of this system to achieve this objective. The analysis requires the use of complex computational tools for simulation and verification using analytical solutions and comparisons with experimental data.

This investigation builds upon previous detailed design work for the PB-AHTR components, including the core, reactivity control mechanisms and the intermediate heat exchanger, developed in 2008. In addition the study of this reference plant design employs a wealth of auxiliary information including thermal-hydraulic physical phenomena correlations for multiple geometries and thermophysical properties for the constituents of the plant. Finally, the set of performance requirements and limitations imposed from physical constrains and safety considerations provide with a criteria and metrics for acceptability of the design. The passive safety cooling system concept is turned into a detailed design as a result from this study.

A methodology for the design of air-cooled passive safety systems was developed and a transient analysis of the plant, evaluating a scrammed loss of forced cooling event was performed. Furthermore, a design optimization study of the passive safety system and an approach for the validation and verification of the analysis is presented. This study demonstrates that the resulting point design responds properly to the transient event and maintains the core and reactor components at acceptable temperatures within allowable safety margins. It is also demonstrated that the transition from steady full-power, forced-cooling mode to steady decay-heat, natural-circulation mode is stable, predictable and well characterized.