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How A Pressurized Water Reactor Works

How a Pressurized light Water Reactor works (M J Rhoades) Part 1 Dedicated to Susan BSC It's hard to understand all the physics that goes into making a Pressurized Water Reactor. But I am going to give it my best shot without going into the entire mathematics evolved. (Only for part 1 and 2) First of all, the only thing that we want to do is make steam to turn a turbine and produce electrical energy. This can be done by burning coal, natural gas, diesel, or a Nuclear Reactor. See below a cutawa

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378 views5 pages

How A Pressurized Water Reactor Works

How a Pressurized light Water Reactor works (M J Rhoades) Part 1 Dedicated to Susan BSC It's hard to understand all the physics that goes into making a Pressurized Water Reactor. But I am going to give it my best shot without going into the entire mathematics evolved. (Only for part 1 and 2) First of all, the only thing that we want to do is make steam to turn a turbine and produce electrical energy. This can be done by burning coal, natural gas, diesel, or a Nuclear Reactor. See below a cutawa

Uploaded by

M J Rhoades
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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How a Pressurized light Water Reactor works (M J Rhoades) Part 1

Dedicated to Susan BSC

It's hard to understand all the physics that goes into making a Pressurized Water Reactor. But
I am going to give it my best shot without going into the entire mathematics evolved. (Only for
part 1 and 2) First of all, the only thing that we want to do is make steam to turn a turbine and
produce electrical energy. This can be done by burning coal, natural gas, diesel, or a Nuclear
Reactor. See below a cutaway view of a nuclear power plant, this is a Boiling Water Reactor
(BWR) but it gives you an idea of how a reactor plant is laid out.

Turbine for
electrical power
output

Nuclear Reactor
Ok let's make a reactor. The first thing we are going to need is Uranium and lots of it. The
reason we are going to need a lot is that we are after a specific isotope of Uranium (An isotope is
an element that has the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons). Most of the
Uranium found in the earth is mostly Uranium-238, with some Uranium-235, and Uranium-234.
Only .72% is U-235 and .0055% is U-234. Uranium 235 is the stuff we are interested in because
it is the atom that likes to fission (The splitting of the atom resulting in two fragments, two to
three neutrons and release of energy in the form of radiation) when a neutron is absorbed. There
are several methods for separating U-235 from the other isotopes but we are looking to enrich the
amount of U-235 to about 2-3 %. Also, understand that if you continue to enrich the amount of
U-235 you can make an atomic bomb; this is what is feared the Iranians are doing instead of
making fuel as they say. With the Uranium enriched to 2-3%, and formed into Uranium oxide
pellets then we can get a sustained nuclear reaction in our core (the assembly of fuel and other
stuff) when the conditions are right.

We now need to consider how we are going to put the Uranium oxide pellets in our reactor.
The easiest way to do this is to load them into fuel rods. Fuel rods are just long cylindrical tubes
in which you can load the fuel pellets and seal them up. See the drawing below for what a typical
fuel rod would look like.

When fuel pellets are loaded, the


chamber is evacuated and filled with
an inert gas usually Helium. This
prevents interaction between the
Fuel pellets 2-3% U- fuel pellets and the zircaloy clad
235 enriched

Fuel tube cladding, this is made from Zirconium alloy, the reason
zirconium is used is because it has a low crossection for absorption of
thermal neutrons which we need to carry out our chain reaction which
we will discuss later. And it is very corrosion resistant and can tolerate
the high temperatures in our future core.
Ok, next we need to start assembling are fuel rods into fuel bundles and support them in grids
and stick a control rod in them to make sure that we dont go critical before we want to. See the
drawing below for how the fuel rods are placed into a fuel bundle for placement in our core.

Control rod is inserted


to limit nuclear
reaction

Individual
fuel rods are
placed into
grids. This a
fuel
assembly

A control rod is made of Hafnium,


Indium, and Boron alloys. These
materials are used because they
have a large crossection of
absorption for neutrons. We will
talk about crossection later in part
2

We now have our fuel bundles and are ready to start loading our core in order to form a critical
mass configuration (Critical geometry) remember we have are control rods installed so we won't
go critical. Oops, we need something to put our bundles in. Ok, we need a pressure vessel, why
is it called a pressure vessel? Because it's a pressurized water reactor and there will be high
pressure applied to keep the core area from boiling when the reactor is in operation. An analogy
would be like a pressure cooker. Because pressure is applied, the water goes to a higher
temperature before it boils and causes the food to cook faster. The pressure vessel is constructed
of stainless steel alloys and is very strong. We now load our fuel bundles and place the head on
our reactor, hook up our control rod drives (For raising and lowering the control rods). Put in our
piping the steam generators, and we are ready to fill the reactor and piping with water. See the
drawing below for assembled fuel bundles, pressure vessel, and reactor vessel head.
After our core, pressure vessel, piping, steam generators, presurizer, pumps and valves are all
put together, it looks like the below drawing. Now the number of steam generators or reactor
coolant pumps may change but this layout is typical for all PWR type reactors in the U.S.
Reactor coolant (H2O) is pumped by the reactor coolant pumps into the pressure vessel and is
diverted down and up through the fuel bundles and out to the steam generators and back to the
core. The presurizer applies pressure to the reactor coolant system by use of electric heaters
heating the water inside until a steam void forms in the top. Kind of like the water heater used in
you homes. The steam generators have the reactor coolant flowing on one side and the secondary
water flowing on the other side and this creates the steam for turning the turbine when the reactor
is in operation.
Steam to the turbine

Hot water enters the


primary side of the
steam generator and
goes through primary
Steam void tubes Feed water is
pumped into the S/G
goes down, then up
passes around the
tubes, and out the
top as steam

Heaters

Reactor coolant pumps circulate the


water to the reactor and back to the
steam generators

Our core we made now sits inside


the Vessel ready to be started up

This is the end of part one, part two will cover the reactor theory and start up of our core.

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