Design approach for mitigation of air ingress in high temperature gas-cooled reactor

Sato, Hiroyuki  ; Ohashi, Hirofumi ; Nakagawa, Shigeaki  

This paper intends to propose a practical solution to protect the HTR from severe oxidation against air ingress accidents without reliance on subsystems. Firstly, a change is made to the center reflector structure to minimize temperature difference during the accident condition in order to reduce buoyancy-driven natural circulation in the reactor. Secondly, a modified structure of the upper reflector is suggested to prevent massive air ingress against a rupture in standpipes. As a preliminary study, a numerical analysis is performed for a typical prismatic-type HTGR. The results showed that amount of air ingress into the reactor can be significantly reduced with practical changes to local structure in the reactor.