On-line Corrosion Product Monitor for Monitoring of Corrosion Products in the Secondary Side of Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs)

Abstract

The authors have developed a new on-line corrosion product monitor (OCPM) to automatically measure the concentrations of corrosion products in PWR secondary water. The corrosion products of interest for this application are mainly iron and copper. The OCPM offers a number of outstanding features: (1) it measures trace metals on-line; (2) it allows simultaneous quantitative multi-element analysis; (3) its operation is fully automatic with an excellent lower detection limit; and (4) it is transportable and easy to operate. During its development stage, the OCPM was applied at an actual PWR plant and was able to successfully automatically analyze the concentrations of iron and other trace metals contained in the PWR secondary water, while maintaining operational stability without operator intervention for long periods of time. It was also shown that the use of this new system would greatly reduce the workload of plant water chemistry personnel, providing a better alternative to conventional chemical analysis methods. The OCPM is now being introduced into several PWR plants in Japan, with the objectives of conducting detailed studies of the corrosion product behavior in the plant systems and reducing the workload of plant personnel.