Passive Safety Features in Sodium Cooled Super-Safe, Small and Simple Reactor

This paper describes the passive safety features utilized in the updated sodium cooled Super-Safe, Small and Simple fast reactor, which is the improved 4S reactor. This reactor can operate up to ten years without refueling and neutron reflector regulates the reactivity. One of the design requirements is to secure the core against all anticipated transients without reactor scram. Therefore, the reactor concept is to design to enhance the passive safety features. All temperature reactivity feedback coefficients including whole core sodium void worth are negative. Also, introducing of RVACS (Reactor Vessel Auxiliary Cooling System) can enhance the passive decay heat removal capability. Safety analyses are carried out to simulate various transient sequences, which are loss of flow events, transient overpower events and loss of heat sink events, in order to evaluate the passive safety capabilities. A calculation tool for plant dynamics analyses for fast reactors has been modified to model the 4S including the unique plant system, which are reflector control system, circulation pumps and RVACS. The analytical results predict that the designed passive features improve the safety in which temperature variation in transients are satisfied with the safety criteria for the fuel element and the structure of the primary coolant boundary.