Assessing the Design effect of Pressure Vessel Height and Radius on Reactor Stability and Safety

Abstract

The Design of Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) should be that the height of pressure vessel is up to 16.0m and radius is up to 5.6m to ensure safe operation of nuclear reactor. The research conducted safety margin test on the design dimension of RPV in terms of the height and radius, secondly safety margin test was carried out on applied high temperature on the reactor graphite core and thirdly, safety margin test were perform on the cooling problem of the nuclear reactor core in relation to fuel temperature. By applying Linear Regression Analysis Techniques on some typical Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) models. The results of the statistical analysis on these types of nuclear reactor models reveals that the RPV models promises stability under application of pressure vessel up to 16.0m height and radius 5.6m. At this point the temperature seems at maximum and the reactor agrees to be more stable as the regression plot was optimized, that is the least squares method finds its optimum when the sum, S, of squared residuals is at minimum. The safety margin prediction of 3.1% was validated for a typical RPV model as an advantage over the current 5.1% challenging problem for plant engineers to predict the safety margin limit.

Keywords: Reactor pressure vessel design, height and radius, high temperature effect, fuel element, risk and failure, reactor safety, safety factor, ?, optimization, stability margin, reactor pressure vessel design models, selection of pressure vessel.