Reactor hot spot analysis

The principle methods for performing reactor hot spot analysis are reviewed and examined for potential use in the Applied Physics Division. The semistatistical horizontal method is recommended for future work and is now available as an option in the SE2-ANL core thermal hydraulic code. The semistatistical horizontal method is applied to a small LMR to illustrate the calculation of cladding midwall and fuel centerline hot spot temperatures. The example includes a listing of uncertainties, estimates for their magnitudes, computation of hot spot subfactor values and calculation of two sigma temperatures. A review of the uncertainties that affect liquid metal fast reactors is also presented. It was found that hot spot subfactor magnitudes are strongly dependent on the reactor design and therefore reactor specific details must be carefully studied. 13 refs., 1 fig., 5 tabs

Information technology and data mining for spent fuel treatment

Information technology is being used to provide interactive access to data collected from the electro-metallurgical treatment of spent fuel. The data are results from many hundreds of experiments performed to better characterize the processes by which uranium is separated from the waste products. Web-based display and relational database query capabilities facilitate the identification of trends in the data and the relating of these trends to the underlying electrochemistry. The objectives are to ensure that the process behavior is well understood, to make readily accessible the necessary data for development and validation of models, and to identify unexpected trends in the data as indications of phenomena not yet represented in the models

Using Markov Models and Statistics to Learn, Extract, Fuse, and Detect Patterns in Raw Data

Many systems are partially stochastic in nature. We have derived data driven approaches for extracting stochastic state machines (Markov models) directly from observed data. This chapter provides an overview of our approach with numerous practical applications. We have used this approach for inferring shipping patterns, exploiting computer system side-channel information, and detecting botnet activities. For contrast, we include a related data-driven statistical inferencing approach that detects and localizes radiation sources.Comment: Accepted by 2017 International Symposium on Sensor Networks, Systems and Securit

Alternate VHTR/HTE INterface for mitigating tritum.

High temperature creep in structures at the interface between the nuclear plant and the hydrogen plant and the migration of tritium from the core through structures in the interface are two key challenges for the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) coupled to the High Temperature Electrolysis (HTE) process. The severity of these challenges, however, can be reduced by lowering the temperature at which the interface operates. Preferably this should be accomplished in a way that does not reduce combined plant efficiency and other performance measures. A means for doing so is described in this report. A heat pump is used to raise the temperature of near-waste heat from the PCU to the temperature at which nine-tenths of the HTE process heat is needed. In addition to mitigating tritium transport and creep of structures, structural material commodity costs are reduced and plant efficiency is increased by a couple of percent

NGNP/HTE Full-Power Operation at Reduced High-Temperature Heat Exchanger Temperatures.

Operation of the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP) with reduced reactor outlet temperature at full power was investigated for the High Temperature Electrolysis (HTE) hydrogen-production application. The foremost challenge for operation at design temperature is achieving an acceptably long service life for heat exchangers. In both the Intermediate Heat Exchanger (IHX) and the Process Heat Exchanger (PHX) (referred to collectively as high temperature heat exchangers) a pressure differential of several MPa exists with temperatures at or above 850 C. Thermal creep of the heat exchanger channel wall may severely limit heat exchanger life depending on the alloy selected. This report investigates plant performance with IHX temperatures reduced by lowering reactor outlet temperature. The objective is to lower the temperature in heat transfer channels to the point where existing materials can meet the 40 year lifetime needed for this component. A conservative estimate for this temperature is believed to be about 700 C. The reactor outlet temperature was reduced from 850 C to 700 C while maintaining reactor power at 600 MWt and high pressure compressor outlet at 7 MPa. We included a previously reported design option for reducing temperature at the PHX. Heat exchanger lengths were adjusted to reflect the change in performance resulting from coolant property changes and from resizing related to operating-point change. Turbomachine parameters were also optimized for the new operating condition. An integrated optimization of the complete system including heat transfer equipment was not performed. It is estimated, however, that by performing a pinch analysis the combined plant efficiency can be increased from 35.5 percent obtained in this report to a value between 38.5 and 40.1 percent. Then after normalizing for a more than three percent decrease in commodities inventory compared to the reference plant, the commodities-normalized efficiency lies between 40.0 and 41.3. This compares with a value of 43.9 for the reference plant. This latter plant has a reactor outlet temperature of 850 C and the two high temperature heat exchangers. The reduction in reactor outlet temperature from 850 C to 700 C reduces the tritium permeability rate in the IHX metal by a factor of three and thermal creep by five orders of magnitude. The design option for reducing PHX temperature from 800 C to 200 C reduces the permeability there by three orders of magnitude. In that design option this heat exchanger is the single 'choke-point' for tritium migration from the nuclear to the chemical plant

Dynamic Modeling Efforts for System Interface Studies for Nuclear Hydrogen Production.

System interface studies require not only identifying economically optimal equipment configurations, which involves studying mainly full power steady-state operation, but also assessing the operability of a design during load change and startup and assessing safety-related behavior during upset conditions. This latter task is performed with a dynamic simulation code. This report reviews the requirements of such a code. It considers the types of transients that will need to be simulated, the phenomena that will be present, the models best suited for representing the phenomena, and the type of numerical solution scheme for solving the models to obtain the dynamic response of the combined nuclear-hydrogen plant. Useful insight into plant transient behavior prior to running a dynamics code is obtained by some simple methods that take into account component time constants and energy capacitances. Methods for determining reactor stability, plant startup time, and temperature response during load change, and tripping of the reactor are described. Some preliminary results are presented

Initial Assessment of the Operability of the Vhtr-Htse Nuclear Hydrogen Plant.

The generation of hydrogen from nuclear power will need to compete on three fronts: production, operability, and safety to be viable in the energy marketplace of the future. This work addresses the operability of a coupled nuclear and hydrogen-generating plant while referring to other work for progress on production and safety. Operability is a measure of how well a plant can meet time-varying production demands while remaining within equipment limits. It can be characterized in terms of the physical processes that underlie operation of the plant. In this work these include the storage and transport of energy within components as represented by time constants and energy capacitances, the relationship of reactivity to temperature, and the coordination of heat generation and work production for a near-ideal gas working fluid. Criteria for assessing operability are developed and applied to the Very High Temperature Reactor coupled to the High Temperature Steam Electrolysis process, one of two DOE/INL reference plant concepts for hydrogen production. Results of preliminary plant control and stability studies are described. A combination of inventory control in the VHTR plant and flow control in the HTSE plant proved effective for maintaining hot-side temperatures near constant during quasi-static change in hydrogen production rate. Near constant electrolyzer outlet temperature is achieved by varying electrolyzer cell area to control cell joule heating. It was found that rates of temperature change in the HTSE plant for a step change in hydrogen production rate are largely determined by the thermal characteristics of the electrolyzer. It's comparatively large thermal mass and the presence of recuperative heat exchangers result in a tight thermal coupling of HTSE components to the electrolyzer. It was found that thermal transients arising in the chemical plant are strongly damped at the reactor resulting in a stable combined plant. The large Doppler reactivity component, three times greater than next reactivity component, per unit temperature, is mainly responsible. This is the case even when one of the conditions for out-of-phase oscillations between reactor inlet and outlet temperature, a large time for transport of process heat between the reactor and chemical plant, exists

Scalability of the natural convection shutdown heat removal test facility (NSTF) data to VHTR/NGNP RCCS designs.

Passive safety in the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) is strongly dependent on the thermal performance of the Reactor Cavity Cooling System (RCCS). Scaled experiments performed in the Natural Shutdown Test Facility (NSTF) are to provide data for assessing and/or improving computer code models for RCCS phenomena. Design studies and safety analyses that are to support licensing of the VHTR will rely on these models to achieve a high degree of certainty in predicted design heat removal rate. To guide in the selection and development of an appropriate set of experiments a scaling analysis has been performed for the air-cooled RCCS option. The goals were to (1) determine the phenomena that dominate the behavior of the RCCS, (2) determine the general conditions that must be met so that these phenomena and their relative importance are preserved in the experiments, (3) identify constraints specific to the NSTF that potentially might prevent exact similitude, and (4) then to indicate how the experiments can be scaled to prevent distortions in the phenomena of interest. The phenomena identified as important to RCCS operation were also the subject of a recent PIRT study. That work and the present work collectively indicate that the main phenomena influencing RCCS heat removal capability are (1) radiation heat transport from the vessel to the air ducts, (2) the integral effects of momentum and heat transfer in the air duct, (3) buoyancy at the wall inside the air duct giving rise to mixed convection, and (4) multidimensional effects inside the air duct caused by non-uniform circumferential heat flux and non-circular geometry

Peptide Cotransmitters as Dynamic, Intrinsic Modulators of Network Activity

Neurons can contain both neuropeptides and “classic” small molecule transmitters. Much progress has been made in studies designed to determine the functional significance of this arrangement in experiments conducted in invertebrates and in the vertebrate autonomic nervous system. In this review article, we describe some of this research. In particular, we review early studies that related peptide release to physiological firing patterns of neurons. Additionally, we discuss more recent experiments informed by this early work that have sought to determine the functional significance of peptide cotransmission in the situation where peptides are released from neurons that are part of (i.e., are intrinsic to) a behavior generating circuit in the CNS. In this situation, peptide release will presumably be tightly coupled to the manner in which a network is activated. For example, data obtained in early studies suggest that peptide release will be potentiated when behavior is executed rapidly and intervals between periods of neural activity are relatively short. Further, early studies demonstrated that when neural activity is maintained, there are progressive changes (e.g., increases) in the amount of peptide that is released (even in the absence of a change in neural activity). This suggests that intrinsic peptidergic modulators in the CNS are likely to exert effects that are manifested dynamically in an activity-dependent manner. This type of modulation is likely to differ markedly from the modulation that occurs when a peptide hormone is present at a relatively fixed concentration in the blood