Transient heat pipe failure accident analysis of a megawatt heat pipe cooled reactor

Abstract Heat pipe cooled reactors, which use heat pipes rather than fluid flow for passive cooling, are an excellent candidate for micro nuclear power sources. Heat pipes provide excellent built-in redundancy and safety margin. However, a heat pipe failure is quite likely over the reactor lifetime, which is one of the essential design basis accidents in the reactor design. This work analyzes heat pipe failure accidents to investigate the system transient performance and the response of a heat pipe cooled reactor. Single heat pipe failure and cascading heat pipe failure are simulated and analyzed by establishing a transient analysis code, including a point reactor kinetics model, a core thermal-mechanical model, and a heat pipe model. The simulation shows that in the single heat pipe failure accident, the peak monolith temperature at the failed channel increases and is only 8 K lower than the fuel center temperature. In the cascading heat pipe failure accident, the temperatures in each channel suddenly increase over a short period and rise to the maximum at 22,900 s as the heat losses increase and the core power decreases. The sensitivity of the external convection for residual heat removal is also analyzed. For small external convection coefficients less than 100 W/m2K, increasing the external convection coefficient significantly reduces the maximum temperatures. By contrast, for external convection coefficient greater than 500 W/m2K, increasing external convection coefficient still reduces the core peak temperature, but the effect is weak.