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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.
In operation, decay heat boils steam, which is drawn into the heat exchanger and condensed; then it falls by weight of gravity back into the reactor. This process keeps the cooling water in the reactor, making it unnecessary to use powered feedwater pumps. The water in the open pool slowly boils off, venting clean steam to the atmosphere.
The removal of heat from nuclear reactors is an essential step in the generation of energy from nuclear reactions.In nuclear engineering there are a number of empirical or semi-empirical relations used for quantifying the process of removing heat from a nuclear reactor core so that the reactor operates in the projected temperature interval that depends on the materials used in the construction ...
A gas-cooled reactor (GCR) is a nuclear reactor that uses graphite as a neutron moderator and a gas (carbon dioxide or helium in extant designs) as coolant. [1] Although there are many other types of reactor cooled by gas, the terms GCR and to a lesser extent gas cooled reactor are particularly used to refer to this type of reactor.
A molten-salt reactor (MSR) is a class of nuclear fission reactor in which the primary nuclear reactor coolant and/or the fuel is a mixture of molten salt with a fissile material. Two research MSRs operated in the United States in the mid-20th century.
A high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) is a type of gas-cooled nuclear reactor which uses uranium fuel and graphite moderation to produce very high reactor core output temperatures. [1] All existing HTGR reactors use helium coolant. The reactor core can be either a "prismatic block" (reminiscent of a conventional reactor core) or a ...
A fission fragment reactor is a nuclear reactor that generates electricity by decelerating an ion beam of fission byproducts instead of using nuclear reactions to generate heat. By doing so, it bypasses the Carnot cycle and can achieve efficiencies of up to 90% instead of 40–45% attainable by efficient turbine-driven thermal reactors.
This primary, secondary, tertiary cooling scheme is the basis of the pressurized water reactor, which is the most common nuclear power plant design worldwide. In other types of reactors, such as the pressurised heavy water reactors of the CANDU design, the primary fluid is heavy water.