Education and Training Series #34: Passive Decay Heat Removal Systems

These webinars, organised by the GIF Education and Training Working Group are streamed live monthly. The recordings and slide decks are accessible after the webinar on this website. These webinars cover a very broad range of technical and policy related topics. At the end of 2023 they have been viewed by more than 15000 people (approximately half of the views during the live streams and the other half views being of the archives on the public GIF website). In total, the GIF webinars have reached Generation IV enthusiasts, scientists, and engineers in more than 80 countries.

These webinars are organised and hosted by the GIF Education and Training Working Group (ETWG). 

A major design goal for Generation IV nuclear energy systems is to reduce or eliminate the likelihood and/or extent of reactor core damage incurred during an off-normal operating event, thereby eliminating the need for offsite emergency response. One approach for achieving this objective is to develop inherently safe reactor designs that can passively dissipate decay heat to the environment without relying on operator action during an event of this type. Historically, this approach has been taken for both sodium- and gas-cooled Generation IV reactor types by providing Reactor Cavity Cooling Systems (RCCS) that are designed to passively dissipate decay heat to the environment by natural convection while maintain fuel temperature below the threshold for onset of core damage. This presentation will begin by providing a high level overview of RCCS systems that have been developed for advanced reactor designs over the years. This will be followed by a summary of large scale integral effect tests that are currently underway at Argonne to provide licensing-quality data for two of these systems; i.e., air- and water-cooled RCCS concepts.