Numerical Study of the Air Ingress Accident of the HTR-PM and Possible Mitigation Measures

Abstract

The double-ended guillotine break (DEGB) of the horizontal coaxial gas duct of a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor is an extremely hypothetical accident, which could cause the air to enter into the primary circuit and react with graphite in the reactor core. The performance of the HTR-PM plant under this extremely hypothetical accident has been studied by the system code TINTE in this work. The results show that the maximum fuel temperature will not reach the temperature design limitation, and the graphite oxidation will not cause unacceptable consequences even under some conservative assumptions. Moreover, nitrogen and helium injected from the fuel charging tube were studied as the possible mitigation measures to further alleviate the consequences of this air ingress accident. The preliminary results show that only the flow rate of nitrogen injected reaches a certain value, which can effectively alleviate the consequences, while for helium injection, both high and small flow rate can prevent or cut off the natural circulation and alleviate the consequences. The reason is that helium is much lighter than nitrogen, and the density difference between the coolant channel and the reactor core is small when helium is injected. Considering the injection velocity, the total usage amount, and the start time of gas injection, helium injected with a small flow rate is suggested.