Chapter 11 - Design Applications

Abstract

There is a pump(s) that provides the head to circulate the primary reactor coolant to the purification equipment. Because this equipment is not located within the reactor building, there may be several hundred feet of highpressure/high-temperature piping runs to external buildings where the equipment is housed. Also, the ion exchanger(s) is generally not as large as the hot filters. The hot filters may experience two or three times the coolant mass flux as the ion exchangers. The size of the ion exchangers, and thus their design flow rate, is limited by the amount of process cooling required to reduce the temperature of the primary reactor coolant from typical operational temperatures to near room temperature. This design concept includes the use of an absolute filter upstream of the ion exchanger in the cold part of the loop. In fact, this absolute filter is defined to be a magnetic filter that employs rare-earth magnets. The loop completely eliminates the hot filter, and by placing this absolute filter in the cold part of the loop, it also eliminates any hydrothermal dissolution fluxes and reentrainment flux, which can act as sources in hot filters.