Nuclear Production of Hydrogen, Fourth Information Exchange ...

STATUS OF THE KOREAN NUCLEAR HYDROGEN PRODUCTION PROJECT
Figure 2: Design tools
Design Analysis Codes
Nuclear Design Codes
PSA PSA
PSA-AIMS
PSA-AIMS
Temp.
Fuel & Graphite
COPA
FP to coolant
Coolant Activity
HyPEP-FP/T/Dust
System System Layout Layout & Efficiency
Efficiency
HyPEP
HyPEP
Sys. Configuration
Sys. Performance
Thermo-Fluid & Safety
GAMMA+/CAPP (DBA, BDBA)
MARS-GCR/MASTER (2-φ Tran.)
GAMMA-TF/CAPP (RPV TF)
CFX (Component TF, H 2 Explosion)
Mass &
energy
discharge
FPs
Corroded
source
Fission Products &
Containment
GAMMA-FP/T/Dust
mass
SI SI Dynamics Dynamics
DySCO
DySCO
T, P
Thermo-Mechanical
Graphite Seismic
ANSYS/ABAQUS
Graphite Corrosion
GAMMA+, COPA
Library
MCNP
DH Treatment
Reference
Verification
Library
HELIOS/LIBERTE
Output
HOPE/PROLOG
CX Tableset
MASTER-GCR (PMR)
CAPP (PBR)
Transport Lattice Calculation
- Fuel Block, Pebble, Reflector
CX Tablesets
- Burnup, Temperatures, …
Diffusion Core Calculation
- Physics Analysis
Activity release
Atmospheric Atmospheric dispersion dispersion & Public Public dose
dose
TBD
TBD
thermo-fluid transport. An upgraded version of GAMMA, GAMMA+. will be coupled with a new reactor
physics code CAPP (Lee, H.C., 2008). The CAPP code fully utilises modern computer programming
standard C++. Helium flow in the complex geometries such as inlet plenum, outlet plenum, and
pebbles (In, 2008; Lee, S.Y, 2008), is modelled by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes. There are
several computer code to look at consequences of reactor incident such as COPA (Kim, Y-M., 2008) for
fuel performance, and others for radioactivity transportation analysis. For mechanical analysis, a
methodology using ANSYS and ABACUS is under development (Kim, D-O., 2008). For the transient
analysis of sulphur iodine thermochemical process, a computer program named DySCO (Shin, 2008a)
is under development.
Some of the experimental activities are undergoing to verify design tools such as the pebble heat
transfer (Lee, J-J., 2007), the reactor cavity cooling system heat transfer (Cho, 2006).
Materials and components
Most of the material research is in collaboration with Generation-IV VHTR research activities. Properties
of the nuclear graphite, the metallic material such as A617 and 9Cr1Mo, the ceramic composite are
under investigation by measuring specimens.
Corrosion resistant material is a key issue for success of sulphuric thermochemical cycle. Silicon
carbide, hastelloy, gold and Fe-Si alloys have a good corrosion rate less than 1 mm per year. However,
long-term behaviour is different from that of short-term behaviour due to a protective layer (Kim, H.P.,
2008). A long-term corrosion in realistic environment is required for selecting suitable material for
large scale SI chemical plant.
Since the process heat exchanger (PHE) is the most challenging component to couple VHTR with
the sulphur decomposition section of the SI thermochemical process where high temperature and
corrosion requirement is the most severe, KAERI is investigating the possibility of using a noble
approach to use the ion beam mixing on the surface of a ceramic-coated metallic layer (Park, 2007). The
corrosion resistance in the boiling sulphuric acid and thermal cycling environment was satisfactory so
that a test PHE is manufactured (Kim, Y-W., 2008). A small gas loop of 10 kW (Hong, 2008) was built to
test the performance of the IBM PHE. The initial test will be published in the near future.
Coated fuel
Fuel manufacturing technology in KAERI is concentrated on fabricating a quality TRISO. Currently a
20 gram per batch UO 2 kernel fabrication apparatus and a 20 gram per batch SiC coater are installed at
KAERI (Lee, Y-W., 2008). Properties of the fabricated TRISO particle are investigated using various
characterisation methods such as the particle size analyser, the density analyser, the density gradient
62 NUCLEAR PRODUCTION OF HYDROGEN – © OECD/NEA 2010