Kema Scientific and Technical Reports, Volume 7, Number 3. Special Issue: Stability Monitoring of the Dodewaard Boiling-Water Reactor

摘要

Methods for measuring the stability of a boiling-water reactor (BWR) are discussed. The results of experiments performed on the Dodewaard reactor (The Netherlands) are reported. Research on the reactor is of interest as it is cooled by natural circulation, a cooling principle that is also being considered for new reactor designs. The stability of the Dodewaard reactor was studied both with deterministic methods (control-rod steps and pressure-valve movements) and by noise analysis. Reactor-kinetic stability, thermal-hydraulic stability and total-plant stability were investigated separately. It is shown that the Dodewaard reactor has very large stability margins. A novel technique is presented, which enables the variations of the in-core coolant velocity to be determined by noise correlation. It was observed that stability effects on the coolant velocity are masked by other effects originating from the local flow pattern. (Copyright (c) 1989 N.V. KEMA.)