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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.
Gordana Vukovic, Michael L. Corradini
Nuclear Technology | Volume 115 | Number 1 | July 1996 | Pages 46-60
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35274
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To investigate liquid-metal (fuel)/water (coolant) interactions, a vertical shock tube has been designed and constructed. A series of tests was conducted with gallium, indium, lead, and tin as the fuel materials at either low” (Tf ∼ 300°C) or “high” fuel temperature (Tf ∼ 600°C), with water at room temperature (low Tc) and in the range of Tc = 56 to 67°C (high Tc), and with driving pressures from 0.25 to 1.22 MPa. These materials were tested to determine their compatibility for potential use in liquid-metal divertor systems for fusion power plants. The increase in fuel and water temperature, as well as the increase of driving pressure, caused more energetic interactions to occur. High Tf tin and lead interactions, and high Tf and Tc gallium and indium interactions were the most energetic. Stronger interactions produced finer debris fragments. In high Tf gallium and indium interactions, small superficial oxidation was observed. For the first two pulses, larger ratios of compression- (compression of expansion vessel gas) to-expansion work correspond to the experiments with higher fuel and coolant temperatures. For the first pulse, only work ratio values of the most energetic experiments are larger than those of isothermal experiments. Consequently, for such experiments, the impulse values of second pulses are the largest. Higher values of the conversion ratio for the first pulse correspond to more energetic interactions. Even for the most energetic experiments, the conversion ratio is no higher than 1.2%, and no more than 15% (or a few millimetres-thick surface layer) of the initially loaded fuel participated in the interaction, assuming equal initial volumes of fuel and coolant.
