RE: heat output of SCRAMed nuclear reactor
March 20, 2011 at 9:38 pm
(This post was last modified: March 20, 2011 at 9:39 pm by Anomalocaris.)
Ignore that, I was thinking of newly spent fuel.
Something around 10MW total would be more reasonable.
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10 MW is about 35 TJ per hour, so an unpressurized reactor will boil approximately 15 tons of water each hour under 1 atmosphere pressure. So if the reactor is completely being cool by salt water injection and steam release, then salt will accummulate inside the vessel at a rate of approximately 500 KG / hour as water is evaporated at rate of approximately 15000 L/hour. This tells me the inner vessel of the reactor can not be cooled by direct seawater injection alone. If it were, it would be completely filled with salt in under 4-5 days.
Also, the rate of heat output is actually not as high as I expected. At 10MW, an emergency water resevoir of the size of an oylmpic pool placed over the reactor vessel and feeding water by gravity into the reactor vessel could keep the reactor core cool for a week. Pity no such backup measure appears to have been designed into the structure.
