Self-propelling cooling systems. A novel passive cooling system for nuclear power plants

A novel self-propelling cooling system that does not rely on any external resources has been proposed by RWE Technology. It has been shown that the proposed cooling system is highly compact and small and that it can deliver residual heat removal functions for BWRs, PWRs and spent fuel pools. A brief glimpse on current progress of studies that RWE Technology and its partners (University of Duisburg, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) for this system has been offered. Future work is focused on developing an understanding of the transient behaviour of this system, to finalize the turbo-machinery design points and to develop an experimental test loop. (orig.)