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NaK was used as the coolant in the first breeder reactor prototype, the Experimental Breeder Reactor-1, in 1951. Sodium and NaK do, however, ignite spontaneously on contact with air and react violently with water, producing hydrogen gas. This was the case at the Monju Nuclear Power Plant in a 1995 accident and fire. Sodium is also the coolant ...
Use of NaK overcomes this. The Dounreay Fast Reactor is an example. The first nuclear reactor in space, [10] [11] the United States' experimental SNAP-10A satellite, used NaK as coolant. The NaK was circulated through the core and thermoelectric converters by a liquid metal direct current conduction-type pump. [12]
Schematic diagram showing the difference between the Pool and Loop designs of a liquid metal fast breeder reactor. The two main design approaches to sodium-cooled reactors are pool type and loop type. In the pool type, the primary coolant is contained in the main reactor vessel, which therefore includes the reactor core and a heat exchanger.
A nuclear reactor coolant is a coolant in a nuclear reactor used to remove heat from the nuclear reactor core and transfer it to electrical generators and the environment. Frequently, a chain of two coolant loops are used because the primary coolant loop takes on short-term radioactivity from the reactor.
The SNAP Experimental Reactor (SER) was the first reactor to be built by the specifications established for space satellite applications. The SER used uranium zirconium hydride as the fuel and eutectic sodium-potassium alloy as the coolant and operated at approximately 50 kW thermal. The system did not have a power conversion but used a ...
As the primary (reactor) cooling system became hotter, the fuel, sodium coolant, and structure expanded, and the reactor shut down. This test showed that it will shut down using inherent features such as thermal expansion, even if the ability to remove heat from the primary cooling system is lost. [1] EBR-II is now defueled.
The High Pressure Coolant Injection (HPCI) System consists of a pump or pumps that have sufficient pressure to inject coolant into the reactor vessel while it is pressurized. It is designed to monitor the level of coolant in the reactor vessel and automatically inject coolant when the level drops below a threshold.
On the other hand, if a reactor is designed to operate with no voids at all, a large negative void coefficient may serve as a safety system. A loss of coolant in such a reactor decreases the thermal output, but of course heat that is generated is no longer removed, so the temperature could rise (if all other safety systems simultaneously failed).