Novel Plant Protection Strategy for Transient Reactors

摘要

Reactors operating in the controlled transient mode have been proposed for burst-mode power generation in support of Strategic Defense Initiative applications. Because the safety and reliability of the reactor system is of critical importance, the successful design and testing of an effective reactor control and Plant Protection System (PPS) will undoubtedly be crucial to the adoption of these power systems. In this paper we will describe a novel plant protection systems designed for use in the TREAT Upgrade (TU) reactor. The TU reactor (Wade et al. 1982) is designed for controlled transient operation for the testing of reactor fuel behavior under simulated reactor accident conditions. Safe operation of the reactor is of paramount importance and the PPS had to be designed to exacting requirements. The need to meet demanding functional requirements within several major constraints has produced a design that has a relatively small margin between operating and damaging temperature conditions for the TREAT fuel clad. A plant protection system with energy-dependent trip set points lowered worst-case clad temperatures by as much as 180K, as compared with the use of conventional fixed-level trip set points. We believe that the multilayered multilevel protection strategy developed for TU represents the state of the art in terrestrial transient reactor protection systems, and has potential application to the multimegawatt space reactors. 5 refs., 6 figs., 2 tabs.