Investigation of Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor Active Control for Use with the Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Brayton Cycle

摘要

Implementation of active reactor control involving motion of control rods to reduce the core outlet temperature and changing of the primary and intermediate sodium pump speeds to seek to maintain the sodium cold leg temperatures has been found to provide significant benefits over purely autonomous reactor behavior for specific load following transients. Overall, decreasing the core outlet temperature through active control provides the most favorable results in terms of both temperatures and nuclear power plant efficiency. Decreasing the core outlet temperature eliminates the effects of significant thermal transients involving temperature increases (and subsequent decreases) in the sodium cold legs but introduces thermal transients for structures exposed to higher temperature sodium. The results suggest that the efficiency decrease from the lower turbine inlet temperature accompanying decrease of the core outlet temperature does not affect the cycle performance significantly at reduced loads.