The preliminary design of emergency core cooling scheme and loss-of-coolant accident analysis for Tsinghua high flux reactor

Abstract

This paper proposes the preliminary emergency core cooling scheme for Tsinghua High Flux Reactor. According to the thermohydraulic characteristics of high flux reactors, forced circulation needs to be maintained by emergency pumps in the early stage. When the decay power is low enough, natural circulation between core and the reactor pool is initiated to remove the residual core heat. The sources of safety injection are accumulators and reactor pool. Accumulator injection can ensure core safety in the early stage and reactor pool injection can maintain long time stable forced circulation. To avoid emptying the reactor pool, the waterproof zone needs to be built. The waterproof zone consists of reactor pool and several finite volume dry pools. All pipelines and equipment in the reactor coolant system are placed in the dry pools. Once break accident occurs, the dry pool where the break is located can collect the leaked coolant. With the increase of break back pressure, the break flow is restricted. The current scheme is modeled by Relap5 and different size breaks at four locations (namely core inlet, core outlet, primary heat exchanger inlet and main pump inlet) are assumed. According to the response characteristics of the scheme, the accident process can be divided into five stages: non-shutdown stage, high-injection stage, low-injection stage, stable forced circulation stage and natural circulation stage. Critical heat flux predicted by Sudo CHF correlations is adopted as the primary safety criterion. Through analysis, a success path is found to maintain core safety for a wide range of loss-of-coolant accident scenarios.