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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.
Constantine P. Tzanos
Nuclear Technology | Volume 119 | Number 1 | July 1997 | Pages 1-10
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT77-A35390
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The impact of wind velocity on the performance of the reactor vessel auxiliary cooling system (RVACS) of an advanced liquid-metal reactor design is analyzed, and design modifications that mitigate adverse wind effects are investigated. In the reference design, the reactor is served by four communicating RVACS stacks, and each stack has two air inlets. In this two-inlet stack design, winds blowing in a direction 90 deg from the axis formed by the two stack inlets result in pressure distributions around the stacks that drastically change the desired airflow pattern in the RVACS. This leads to significantly elevated RVACS air temperatures and significant azimuthal guard vessel temperature variations. For example, a 27 m/s (60 mph) wind leads to an air temperature at the exit of the RVACS heated section that is ∼115°C higher than that under no-wind conditions. The addition of two more inlets per stack, one inlet per stack side, significantly improves RVACS performance. The air temperature at the exit of the heated RVACS section is significantly reduced below that of the two-inlet design, and this temperature decreases as the wind speed increases. An increase in wind speed from 3 to 27 m/s leads to an air temperature change from 186 to 165°C. The azimuthal temperature variation is also improved. At the top of the guard vessel, this variation is reduced from 62.5 to 8.5°Cat the low wind speed of 3 m/s and from 85.0 to 30.5°C at the high wind speed of 27 m/s.
