DOE OSTI2016
Water ingress accident is one of the typical accidents with potential hazard to the high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR), which will cause reactivity introduction, as well as the chemical corrosion of the graphite fuel elements and reflector structure material. Besides, increase of the primary pressure may result in the opening of the safety valves, consequently leading the release of radioactive isotopes. Therefore high attention has been paid to water ingress phenomenon during the design of the HTGR to verify its inherent safety characteristics. The online continuous discharge and multi-pass of the fuel elements is another important characteristics for the pebble-bed HTGR which can effectively increase the reactor operation availability. From the initial core, a long period of time, namely the running-in phase, is needed to reach the final long-term stable equilibrium core. During this period of time, the core states are totally different, including the number of the fuel elements, the fuel enrichment, the accumulation of the fission product, the temperature feedback coefficient of the reactivity, and so on. In this paper, based on the design of 250 MW Pebble-bed Module High Temperature gas-cooled Reactor (HTR-PM) and a candidate proposal for its initial core and running-in phase, considering three typical states during the running-in phase, the design basis accident of a double-ended guillotine break of one heating tube has been analyzed with the TINTE code, and the results are compared with that of the equilibrium core. Some important parameters during the transient process, including the power, the temperature of the fuel element, the pressure of the primary coolant, as well as the graphite corrosion rate, are studied. To a certain extent, the results can verity the design of the initial core and the running-in phase, and also further prove the safety feature of the HTR. (authors)
21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗