Safety evaluation of supercritical CO2 cooled micro modular reactor

Abstract

To meet the energy requirement for a remote and isolated region, a concept of supercritical CO2 (S-CO2) cooled micro modular reactor (MMR) has been developed, which is easy to transport by fully modularizing the nuclear power system. From the previous work, only the on-design performances Of MMR were presented. However, since the nuclear system needs to meet high safety standard, the design can be finalized only after the evaluation of the nuclear system response under multiple transient conditions. Such transient conditions may include part load operation and postulated accidents. The system response can be evaluated only with a high fidelity computer simulation, since it is almost impossible to construct a nuclear facility to test at such conditions. The simulation is performed to guarantee its autonomous operability and safety. Unfortunately, a system analysis computer code available for the S-CO2 cycle analysis is yet to be developed for the MMR safety evaluation. Description of a S-CO2 system analysis code platform is first presented in this paper. After that, the developed code is validated with experimental data. The steady state of MMR is first modeled with the code, which is followed by simulations of part load operation and postulated accidents of MMR. All simulation results show that the current design of MMR has the ability to maintain its safety and structural integrity even under extreme conditions to protect the public from radiation hazard at all times.