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Latest News
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.
Amir Ali, Edward Blandford, Youho Lee (Univ of New Mexico), Khalid Hattar (SNL), Hyun-Gil Kim, Dong Jun Park (KAERI)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 428-439
The concept of coating the currently used nuclear fuel cladding (zirconium-based alloy) with an oxidation preventive layer could be a solution to suppress undesirable fast reaction kinetics with high-temperature steam. Critical Heat Flux (CHF) is a thermal-hydraulic performance parameter to investigate for these new cladding concepts including Cr-coated Zirc-based cladding. The exposure of coated Zirc-based cladding for an extensive period inside the reactor to severe conditions of high pressure and temperature, water chemistry, and irradiation environment could result in structure and property changes. These changes would have an impact on the heat transfer performance parameters including CHF. Surface wettability analysis, including contact angle (?) and surface roughness (Ra), are simple surface measurements used in the literature to predict changes in the pool boiling heat transfer coefficient and CHF. This work presents the effects of ion irradiation on surface wettability measurements and predicted pool boiling CHF for bare Zirc-4, and multiple Cr-coated Zirc-based samples of different coating thicknesses (5 - 30 ?m). The Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images show no significant surface damages due to ion irradiation. The ion irradiation shows no effects on the measured surface roughness for all samples. Results show that decreasing the Cr-coating thickness results in a higher surface wettability pre- and post- ion irradiation. The irradiated Cr-coated surfaces have higher measured contact angle compared to the unirradiated surfaces. The unpolished coated Zirc samples have larger measured surface roughness compared to the polished surfaces pre- and post- ion irradiation. The predicted pool boiling CHF using the contact angle measurements implemented in Kandlikar model for unirradiated samples is higher than those for irradiated samples.