An experimental study on natural circulation decay heat removal system for a loop type fast reactor

A fully natural circulation-based system is adopted in the decay heat removal system (DHRS) of an advanced loop type fast reactor. Decay heat removal by natural circulation is a significant passive safety measure against station blackout. As a representative of the advanced loop type fast reactor, DHRS of the sodium fast reactor of 1500 MWe being designed in Japan comprises a direct reactor auxiliary cooling system (DRACS), which has a dipped heat exchanger in the reactor vessel, and two units of primary reactor auxiliary cooling system (PRACS), which has a heat exchanger in the primary-side inlet plenum of an intermediate heat exchanger in each loop. The thermal-hydraulic phenomena in the plant under natural circulation conditions need to be understood for establishing a reliable natural circulation driven DHRS. In this study, sodium experiments were conducted using a plant dynamic test loop to understand the thermal-hydraulic phenomena considering natural circulation in the plant under a broad range of plant operation conditions. The sodium experiments simulating the scram transient confirmed that PRACS started up smoothly under natural circulation, and the simulated core was stably cooled after the scram. Moreover, they were conducted by varying the pressure loss coefficients of the loop as the experimental parameters. These experiments confirmed robustness of the PRACS, which the increasing of pressure loss coefficient did not affect the heat removal capacity very much due to the feedback effect of natural circulation.