The high-temperature sodium coolant technology in nuclear power installations for hydrogen power engineering

Abstract

In the case of using high-temperature sodium-cooled nuclear power installations for obtaining hydrogen and for other innovative applications (gasification and fluidization of coal, deep petroleum refining, conversion of biomass into liquid fuel, in the chemical industry, metallurgy, food industry, etc.), the sources of hydrogen that enters from the reactor plant tertiary coolant circuit into its secondary coolant circuit have intensity two or three orders of magnitude higher than that of hydrogen sources at a nuclear power plant (NPP) equipped with a BN-600 reactor. Fundamentally new process solutions are proposed for such conditions. The main prerequisite for implementing them is that the hydrogen concentration in sodium coolant is a factor of 100–1000 higher than it is in modern NPPs taken in combination with removal of hydrogen from sodium by subjecting it to vacuum through membranes made of vanadium or niobium. Numerical investigations carried out using a diffusion model showed that, by varying such parameters as fuel rod cladding material, its thickness, and time of operation in developing the fuel rods for high-temperature nuclear power installations (HT NPIs) it is possible to exclude ingress of cesium into sodium through the sealed fuel rod cladding. However, if the fuel rod cladding loses its tightness, operation of the HT NPI with cesium in the sodium will be unavoidable. Under such conditions, measures must be taken for deeply purifying sodium from cesium in order to minimize the diffusion of cesium into the structural materials.