Solubility calculation of the corrosion products in water-cooled reactors and its application in CATE code

摘要

Highlights•A chemical equilibrium model was developed to calculate the composition and solubility of corrosion products.•The model was set up as a water chemistry module and incorporated into the ACPs source term analysis code CATE.•MIT PWR coolant chemistry loop was simulated using CATE to test the effect of the improvement on solubility calculation.•The simulation results locate in the range of measured data, which means the water chemistry module works well.AbstractActivated corrosion products (ACPs) in the cooling loops are the dominant radioactive source in water-cooled reactors and have great influence on the shielding design and personnel protection. ACPs originate from the neutron activation of corrosion products, and the corrosion products are transported through the loop driven by solubility difference between different regions. So the solubility calculation of the corrosion products is very important to the accuracy of ACPs analysis. In this paper, a chemical equilibrium model was developed to calculate the composition and solubility of corrosion products at different temperatures, pH and additive concentration in water. The model was set up as a water chemistry module and incorporated into the ACPs source term analysis code CATE. The MIT PWR coolant chemistry loop (PCCL) was simulated using CATE to test the effectiveness of the improvement on solubility calculation. The simulation results of mass fraction of Fe, Ni and Cr in the corrosion products in MIT PCCL basically locate in the range of the experimental measured data, which means the water chemistry module works well for solubility calculation of corrosion products. Based on this ability, CATE is supposed to provide accurate prediction of corrosion products and ACPs for both PWRs and fusion reactors.