High-temperature operation mode of HTTR for hydrogen production facility

Ho, H. Q.   ; 後藤 実  ; 長住 達; 石井 俊晃 ; 島崎 洋祐 ; Simanullang, I. L.* ; 藤本 望*; 石塚 悦男   ; 飯垣 和彦 

Ho, H. Q.; Goto, Minoru; Nagasumi, Satoru; Ishii, Toshiaki; Shimazaki, Yosuke; Simanullang, I. L.*; Fujimoto, Nozomu*; Ishitsuka, Etsuo; Iigaki, Kazuhiko

The conceptual design of a demonstration hydrogen production facility using heat supply from the high temperature engineering test reactor is being researched and developed at Japan Atomic Energy Agency. This facility produces hydrogen with a thermochemical water splitting Iodine-Sulphur process that requires high temperature heat to extract hydrogen efficiently. In order to achieve hydrogen with high efficiency, the helium outlet temperature should be as high as 950C. Increasing the outlet temperature increases the reactor core temperature, and as a result the operation time decreases. If the operation time is reduced too much, it is not feasible to use the HTTR as a heat supply for the IS plant. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to estimate the operation time of the HTTR at high operation mode of 950C to confirm whether it could supply long enough high temperature heat for the demonstration hydrogen IS plant. As result, the core temperature increase about by 50 to 100C when the outlet temperature increases from 850 to 950C. Although the increase of core temperature makes keff decrease by about 0.3 percent-delta-k per kelvin, the HTTR can still operate approximately 660EFPD. Therefore, it is possible to use the HTTR for long-term high-temperature heat supply to the demonstration hydrogen production IS plant.