Transient safety evaluation of the heat pipe microreactor – Potential energy source for hydrogen production

Abstract

Recently, microreactor designs have been receiving significant attention in the nuclear industry due to their potential advantages in certain applications. These nuclear reactor designs have been considered to provide reliable and sustainable power for on-site installation and operation. Microreactors may be utilized to provide heat and power to hydrogen production, remote communities, and industrial facilities such as military installations, disaster relief zones, and are being considered for underwater and deep space operation as well. However, these designs and concepts remain largely untested and unproven in the commercial industry. Further research and development are still required to prove microreactor designs are safe and reliable for commercial use. Different cooling technologies have been taken into consideration for microreactor concepts since the 1960s, mainly for federal space reactor projects such as LEGOLRCS, HOMER, and KRUSTY. This work provides thermal hydraulics and analysis for the Idaho National Laboratory's MAGNET (Micro-reactor Agile Non-nuclear Experimental Testbed) facility. The MAGNET facility is currently being developed to duplicate a microreactor design using heat pipe cooling technology. Our main goal is to examine the response of the test facility under steady-state and transient operation conditions. We constructed our own estimated model of the MAGNET geometry using a software coupling method made up of MOOSE/SAM software systems. The steady state results of this work have been published in a former article. The new results mainly focus on the transient states. By communicating with the Idaho National Laboratories, we upgraded the geometry of MAGNET heat pipes. This not only verifies the design of the facility under such conditions but also benchmarks the modeling capability of the MOOSE/SAM code system that can be potentially used to model other microreactor concepts in the future.