Research on water chemistry in a nuclear power plant

To prevent the corrosion problems on important components of nuclear power plants, the computerization methods of water chemistry and the analyses of corrosion failures were studied. A preliminary study on the computerization of water chemistry log-sheet data was performed using a personal computer with dBASE-III and LOTUS packages. Recent technical informations on a computerized online chemistry data management system which provides an efficient and thorough method of system-wide monitoring of utility's secondary side chemistry were evaluated for the application to KEPCO's nuclear power plants. According to the evaluation of water chemistry data and eddy current test results, it was likely that S/G tube defect type was pitting. Pitting is believed to result from excess oxygen in make-up and air ingress, sea-water ingress bycondenser leak, and copper in sludge. A design of a corrosion tests apparatus for the tests under simulated operational conditions, such as water chemistry, water flow, high temperature and pressure, etc., of the plant has been completed. The completion of these apparatus will make it possible to do corrosion tests under the conditions mentioned above to find out the cause of corrosion failures, and to device a counter measure to these. The result of corrosion tests with alloy-600 showed that the initiation of pits occurred most severely around 175 deg C which is lower than plant-operation temperature(300 deg C) while their propagation rate had trend to be maximum around 90 deg C. It was conformed that the use of Cu-base alloys in a secondary cooling system accelerates the formation of pits by the leaking of sea-water and expected that the replacement of them can reduce the failures of S/G tubes by pitting. Preliminary works on the examination of pit-formed specimens with bare eyes, a metallurgical microscope and a SEM including EDAX analysis were done for the future use of these techniques to investigate S/G tubes. Most of corrosion products accumulated in pits were observed to be consisted of Cr-oxide. (Author)