Thermal-Hydraulic Safety Assessment of Full-Scale ESBWR Nuclear Reactor Design

Abstract

The economic simplified boiling water reactor (ESBWR) is a boiling water nuclear reactor of generation III+. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved the ESBWR design as the world's best light-water nuclear reactor in 2014. It has the lowest core damage frequency (industry standard indicator of safety) of any Generation III or III+ reactor. It can cool automatically for more than seven days without using electricity or human intervention. During the operation, the ESBWR is designed to produce electricity while emitting almost no greenhouse gases. The energy generated by an ESBWR will prevent the emission of approximately 7.5 million metric tons of CO2 per year compared to standard electricity production on the U.S. grid. The analysis present in this paper aimed to characterize the thermal-hydraulic simulations of full-scale ESBWR design. The analysis presented will help in recognizing the improvement needed in the reactor design and its passive safety systems. The analysis is performed for normal steady-state and postulated design basis accident scenarios (break in one of the reactor main-steam lines inside the contentment). The simulation results obtained by the code REALP/SCDAPSIM/MOD3.4 are compared with the TRACG04 and MELCOR2.1 code results to determine the code predictability and accuracy under accident conditions of the newly proposed design of the ESBWR nuclear reactor. A parametric study is also carried out with different in-containment break sizes to determine code results' sensitive nature due to natural circulation flow phenomena, which are highly unstable. The analysis shows that the code has produced reasonably accurate results under the tested system thermal-hydraulic conditions compared with the TRACG04 and MELCOR2.1 code simulation results. This agreement between the three codes simulation results demonstrated that the publicly available RELAP5 code model has adequate features to simulate the ESBWR thermal-hydraulics. It has been also demonstrated that for the postulated accident conditions, the design of passive safety systems is capable to capture the accident progression without any active power.