Safety-informed design of lead-cooled reactors on mobile platforms

Nuclear power has a prominent role to play in the energy landscape of the 21st century. To- gether with large reactor designs that make the most out of economies of scale, small, modular reactors (SMR) may also play a role thanks to their potential modular, factory-based and fast deployment, which h...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Sanchis Ramírez, Guillem
Tipo de recurso: tesis de maestría
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/367434
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/367434
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Nuclear reactors
Cooling
Reactors nuclears
Refrigeració
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Energies::Energia nuclear
Descripción
Sumario:Nuclear power has a prominent role to play in the energy landscape of the 21st century. To- gether with large reactor designs that make the most out of economies of scale, small, modular reactors (SMR) may also play a role thanks to their potential modular, factory-based and fast deployment, which have the potential to minimize the capital cost of nuclear, which is one of its main drawbacks. Among such designs, lead-cooled fast reactors (LFR) present some unique strengths, among others their lack of pressurization of the primary system and their potential to passively remove decay heat by means of natural convection. The SUNRISE project, in Sweden, is an effort by, among others, KTH to prove the feasability of this technology. In that context, the analytical design tool ADELE, which draws from the BELLA code produced at KTH, is developed. Its goal is to provide a fast-to-iterate algorithm that uses basic physics constraints to obtain the core design without relying on more computationally costly methods, like Monte Carlo simulations, which are regularly used for that purpose. Specifically, a system that is capable of removing all the residual heat via convective cooling is obtained from a short list of basic input values. This algorithm is implemented into a mobile application, with the goal of being available to Nuclear Engineering students. The resulting code is capable of replicating reference core designs with a reasonable degree of accuracy, given the simplicity of the assumptions used in the process.