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A fuel element failure is a rupture in a nuclear reactor's fuel cladding that allows the nuclear fuel or fission products, either in the form of dissolved radioisotopes or hot particles, to enter the reactor coolant or storage water. [1] The de facto standard nuclear fuel is uranium dioxide or a mixed uranium/plutonium dioxide.
The fuel cladding is the first layer of protection around the nuclear fuel and is designed to protect the fuel from corrosion that would spread fuel material throughout the reactor coolant circuit. In most reactors it takes the form of a sealed metallic or ceramic layer.
Example of a spent fuel pool from the shut-down Caorso Nuclear Power Plant. This pool is not holding large amounts of material. Spent fuel pools (SFP) are storage pools (or "ponds" in the United Kingdom) for spent fuel from nuclear reactors. They are typically 40 or more feet (12 m) deep, with the bottom 14 feet (4.3 m) equipped with storage ...
The Reactor Protection System (RPS) is a system, computerized in later BWR models, that is designed to automatically, rapidly, and completely shut down and make safe the Nuclear Steam Supply System (NSSS – the reactor pressure vessel, pumps, and water/steam piping within the containment) if some event occurs that could result in the reactor entering an unsafe operating condition.
Control rod assembly for a pressurized water reactor, above fuel element Control rods are used in nuclear reactors to control the rate of fission of the nuclear fuel – uranium or plutonium . Their compositions include chemical elements such as boron , cadmium , silver , hafnium , or indium , that are capable of absorbing many neutrons without ...
The zirconium alloy tubes are about 1 cm in diameter, and the fuel cladding gap is filled with helium gas to improve the conduction of heat from the fuel to the cladding. There are about 179-264 fuel rods per fuel bundle and about 121 to 193 fuel bundles are loaded into a reactor core. Generally, the fuel bundles consist of fuel rods bundled ...
The site suffered from a combination of two beyond design-basis events, a powerful earthquake, which may have damaged reactor plumbing and structures, and 15 meter tsunami, which destroyed fuel tanks, generators and wiring, causing back up generators to fail, and battery-powered pumps also eventually failed. Insufficient cooling and failure of ...
As a nuclear fuel bundle increases in burnup (time in reactor), the radiation begins changing not only the fuel pellets inside the cladding, but the cladding material itself. The zirconium chemically reacts to the water flowing around it as coolant, forming a protective oxide on the surface of the cladding.