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In the event of a loss-of-coolant accident in a PWR, the moderator is also lost and the reaction will stop. This negative void coefficient is an important safety feature of these reactors. In CANDU the moderator is located in a separate heavy-water circuit, surrounding the pressurized heavy-water coolant channels.
A pressurized water reactor (PWR) is a type of light-water nuclear reactor. PWRs constitute the large majority of the world's nuclear power plants (with notable exceptions being the UK, Japan, India and Canada). In a PWR, water is used both as a neutron moderator and as coolant fluid for the reactor core.
A neutron moderator is a medium which reduces the velocity of fast neutrons, thereby turning them into thermal neutrons capable of sustaining a nuclear chain reaction involving uranium-235. A good neutron moderator is a material full of atoms with light nuclei which do not easily absorb neutrons. The neutrons strike the nuclei and bounce off.
A pressurized heavy-water reactor (PHWR) is a nuclear reactor that uses heavy water (deuterium oxide D 2 O) as its coolant and neutron moderator. [1] PHWRs frequently use natural uranium as fuel, but sometimes also use very low enriched uranium.
The mere fact that an assembly is supercritical does not guarantee that it contains any free neutrons at all. At least one neutron is required to "strike" a chain reaction, and if the spontaneous fission rate is sufficiently low it may take a long time (in 235 U reactors, as long as many minutes) before a chance neutron encounter starts a chain reaction even if the reactor is supercritical.
One type uses solid nuclear graphite for the neutron moderator and ordinary water for the coolant. See the Soviet-made RBMK nuclear-power reactor. This was the type of reactor involved in the Chernobyl disaster. In the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor, a British design, the core is made of a graphite neutron moderator where the fuel assemblies are ...
These elements have different neutron capture cross sections for neutrons of various energies. Boiling water reactors (BWR), pressurized water reactors (PWR), and heavy-water reactors (HWR) operate with thermal neutrons, while breeder reactors operate with fast neutrons. Each reactor design can use different control rod materials based on the ...
Differently from the PWR, in a BWR the control rods (boron carbide plates) are inserted from below to give a more homogeneous distribution of the power: in the upper side the density of the water is lower due to vapour formation, making the neutron moderation less efficient and the fission probability lower.