CARMEL POLYTECHNIC COLLEGE

ALAPPUZHA

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING

SEMINAR REPORT ON PEBBLE BED REACTORS:A FUTURE FOR NUCLEAR ENERGY

SUBMITTED BY : PRASANTH.K.P

Reg No : 11030175

CARMEL POLYTECHNIC COLLEGE

ALAPPUZHA

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING

CERTIFICATE This is to certify that the seminar report entitled PEBBLE BED REACTOR:A FUTURE FOR NUCLEAR ENERGY presented by

PRASANTH.K.P of fifth and sixth semester diploma in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Carmel polytechnic college, Punnapra, Alappuzha in partially fulfillment of the requirement for the award of Diploma in Electrical and Electronics engineering under the Board of technical Education, during the year 2013-2014

ABSTRACT

Pebble Bed Reactors offer a future for new nuclear energy plants. They are small, modular, inherently safe, flexible in design and operation, use a demonstrated nuclear technology and can be competitive with fossil fuels. Pebble bed reactors are helium cooled reactors that use small tennis ball size fuel balls consisting of only 9 grams of uranium per pebble to provide a low power density reactor. The low power density and large graphite core provide inherent safety features such that the peak temperature reached even under the complete loss of coolant accident without any active emergency core cooling system is 2 significantly below the temperature that the fuel melts. This feature should enhance public confidence in this nuclear technology. With advanced modularity principles as described, a new way of thinking and building nuclear plants is proposed that would improve quality by factory fabrication of space frame modules and site assembly similar to legos would speed the time to operation. It is expected that this type of design and assembly could lower the cost of new nuclear plants such that the biggest impediment to new nuclear construction namely the capital cost of new nuclear plants is removed. This would allow nuclear plants to support the goal of reducing global climate change in an energy hungry world.

INTRODUCTION

One of the major challenges of the reintroduction of nuclear energy into the world energy mix is the development of a nuclear power plant that is competitive with other energy alternatives, such as natural gas, oil or coal. The environmental imperative of nuclear energy is obvious. No greenhouse gases emitted, small amounts of fuel required and small quantities of waste to be disposed of. Unfortunately, the capital costs of new nuclear plants are quite large relative to the fossil alternatives. Despite the fact that nuclear energys operating costs in terms of operations and maintenance and, most importantly, fuel are much lower than fossil alternatives, the barrier of high initial investment is a significant one for utilities around the world. Definitive resolution of the numerous open technical issues is likely to take quite some time. This is time that Exelon --- which hopes to obtain a license from NRC in only two-and-a-half years --- is not inclined to expend. The increased flexibility that utilities need to compete in a deregulated market limits their timelines for decisionmaking, and may well be incompatible with the caution and rigor that advanced nuclear reactor development requires.

PEBBLE-BED REACTOR (PBR)

The pebble-bed

reactor (PBR)

is

graphite-moderated,

gas-

cooled, nuclear reactor. It is a type of very-high-temperature reactor (VHTR), one of the six classes of nuclear reactors in theGeneration IV initiative. The basic design of pebblebed reactors features spherical fuel elements called pebbles. These tennis ball-sized pebbles are made of pyrolytic graphite (which acts as the moderator), and they contain thousands of micro-fuel particles called TRISO particles. These TRISO fuel particles consist of a fissile material (such as 235U) surrounded by a coated ceramic layer of silicon carbide for structural integrity and fission product containment. In the PBR, thousands of pebbles are amassed to create a reactor core, and are cooled by a gas, such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide, which does not react chemically with the fuel elements. This type of reactor is claimed to be passively safe;[1] that is, it removes the need for redundant, active safety systems. Because the reactor is designed to handle high temperatures, it can cool by natural circulation and still survive in accident scenarios, which may raise the temperature of the reactor to 1,600 C. Because of its design, its high temperatures allow higher thermal efficiencies than possible in traditional nuclear power plants (up to 50%) and has the additional feature that the gases do not dissolve contaminants or absorb neutrons as water does, so the core has less in the way of radioactive fluids. The concept was first suggested by Farrington Daniels in the 1940s, but commercial development did not take place until the 1960s in the German AVR reactor by Rudolf Schulten.[2] but this system was plagued with problems and political and economic decisions were made to abandon the technology.[3] The AVR design was licensed to South Africa as the PBMR and China as the HTR-10, the latter currently the only such design operational. In various forms, other designs are under development by MIT, University of California at Berkeley, General Atomics (U.S.),

theDutch company Romawa B.V., Adams Atomic Engines, and Idaho National Laboratory. Pebble bed reactors were developed in Germany over 20 years ago. At the Juelich Research Center, the AVR pebble bed research reactor rated at 40 MWth and 15 MWe operated for 22 years demonstrating that this technology works. The reactor produced heat by passing helium gas through the reactor core consisting of uranium fuelled pebbles. A steam generator was used to generate electricity through a conventional steam electric plant. Germany also built a 300 MWe version of the pebble bed reactor but it suffered some early mechanical and political problems that eventually -

-led to its shutdown. In December 2000, the Institute of Nuclear Energy Technology of the Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, achieved first criticality of their 10 MWth pebble bed research reactor. In the Netherlands, the Petten Research Institute is developing pebble bed reactors for industrial applications in the range of 15 MWth. The attraction to this technology is its safety, simplicity in operation, modularity and economics. Advances in basic reactor and helium gas turbine technology have produced a new version of the pebble bed reactor concepts. Instead of using less efficient steam cycles to produce electricity, new designs as going to direct or indirect cycle helium gas turbines to produce electricity. These designs have target thermal efficiencies in the range of 45% compared to 32% for steam cycles. By avoiding the use of high temperature water, all the difficulties associated with maintaining high temperature water systems are eliminated. The optimum size for a pebble bed was concluded to be about 250 MWth thermal to allow for rapid and modular construction as well as maintaining its inherent safety features. These designs do not require expensive and complicated emergency core cooling systems since the core cannot melt. These advances have led the ESKOM and the MIT team to independently conclude that the modular pebble bed reactor can meet the safety and economic requirements for new generation. Currently, the South African design has been upgraded to 400 MWth and 165 MWe electric. It is in the final design stage with construction to begin in 2007 and commercial operation in 2010.

SCHEMATIC OF A PEBBLE BED REACTOR

COMPONENTS OF PBR
The components of PBR are :-

The reactor unit system The fuel handling The reactor control system The heat transfer system The Generator and Compressors The fuel pebbles

The Reactor Unit

The reactor unit consists of the 3 meter diameter core filled with fuel spheres and surrounded by the graphite reflector. The functions of the reflector are to: Reflect escaping neutrons back into the core, to keep the neutron losses as low as possible; Provide paths for the control rods and the reserve shutdown system absorbers to enter the core region to shut down the reactor, and To provide a heat transport path for the decay heat from the fuel to the Reactor Pressure Vessel so that passive cooling of the core is possible by radiating this heat to a suitable heat sink called the Reactor Cavity Cooling System (RCCS). Provide the volume in which the fuel spheres can move through the core but remain in a well defined geometry. Provide a flow path for the cold gas to be returned to the top of the core. The reactor core contains approximately 360,000 uranium fuelled pebbles about the size of tennis balls. Each pebble contains about 9 gm of low enriched uranium in 10,00015,000 (depending on the design) tiny grains of sandlike microsphere coated particles each with its own a hard silicon carbide shell.. The unique feature of pebble bed reactors is the online refuelling capability in which the pebbles are recirculated with checks on integrity and consumption of uranium.

REACTOR CROSS SECTION