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Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Nam-Il Tak, Min-Hwan Kim, Hong Sik Lim, Jae Man Noh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 177 | Number 3 | March 2012 | Pages 352-365
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-A13480
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the thermal analysis and the design of a prismatic gas-cooled reactor, local analyses have been widely used by modeling a unit cell or single assembly instead of a whole-core geometry. In spite of the recent rapid development of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology, a whole-core CFD analysis for a prismatic reactor still requires tremendous computational expense and might be a heavy burden for designers desiring a large number of calculations with various design options.This paper provides a practical method for the whole-core thermal analysis of a prismatic gas-cooled reactor. The method combines the merits of CFD and system approaches in order to provide the detailed analysis without much computational expense. It solves the three-dimensional heat conduction equation for a solid as in a CFD code. On the other hand, one-dimensional conservation equations are adopted for a fluid as in a system code. With such a combination, a significant reduction in the computational expense, as well as reasonable accuracy, is achieved. In addition, the present method adopts the basic unit cell concept, which eliminates an elaborate grid generation process. Detailed geometries and materials of the prismatic fuel and reflector blocks are efficiently modeled using the basic unit cells.