A study on integrity of LMFBR secondary cooling system to hypothetical tube failure propagation in the steam generator

Full text of publication follows: A fundamental safety issue of liquid-metal-cooled fast breeder reactor (LMFBR) is to maintain the integrity of the secondary cooling system components against violent chemical sodium-water reaction caused by the water leak from the heat transfer tube of steam generators (SG). The produced sodium-water reaction jet would attack more severely surrounding tubes and would cause other tube failures (tube failure propagation), if it was assumed that the water leak was not detected by function-less detectors and proper operating actions to mitigate the tube failure propagation, such as isolations of the SG from the secondary cooling system and turbine water/steam system, and blowing water and steam inside tubes in the SG, were not taken. This study has been made focusing on the affection of large-scale water leak enlarged due to SG tube failure propagation to the structural integrity of the secondary cooling system because the generated pressure pulse caused by a large-scale sodium-water reaction might break heat transfer tubes of the intermediate heat exchanger (IHX). The present work has been made as one part of the study of probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) of LMFBR, because if the heat-transfer tubes of IHX were failed, the reactor core may be affected by the pressure pulse and/or by the sodium-water reaction products transported through the primary cooling system. As tools for PSA of the water leak incident of SG, we have developed QUARK-LP Version 4 code that mainly analyzes the high temperature rupture phenomena and estimates the number of failed tubes during the middle-scale water leak. The pressure pulse behavior generated by sodium-water reaction in the failure SG and the pressure propagation in the secondary cooling system are calculated by using the SWAAM-2 code developed by ANL. Furthermore, the quasi-steady state high pressure and temperature of the secondary cooling system in a long term is estimated by using the SWAAM-LT code also developed in ANL. In this preliminary work event trees have been prepared to make clear the scenario from the initial small-scale leak to the severest large-scale leak due to the tube failure propagation in SG. The probability of failures of leak detectors, nickel membrane-type hydrogen detectors in sodium and pressure gauges that observe the cover gas pressure of SG (EV: evaporator and SH: superheater), is considered in the event trees. On the other hand, rupture disks in SH and EV were assumed to have the normal function in leak detection and reaction products release. In some cases, water/steam blow valves to mitigate leak propagation were assumed hypothetically to fail after the plant trip, and the water and steam remained in SG are not released. A relation between the maximum leak rate resulting from the tube failure propagation and the probability of its occurrence was obtained tentatively from these considerations. Then, the effect of pressure generated by the sodium-water reaction was evaluated to the structural integrity of the secondary cooling system components. (authors)