How to Drive a Nuclear Reactor

✍ Scribed by Colin Tucker

• Publisher: Springer Nature
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 263
• Series: Springer Praxis Books in Popular Science
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Have you ever wondered how a nuclear power station works? This lively book will answer that question. It’ll take you on a journey from the science behind nuclear reactors, through their start-up, operation and shutdown. Along the way it covers a bit of the engineering, reactor history, different kinds of reactors and what can go wrong with them. Much of this is seen from the viewpoint of a trainee operator on a Pressurised Water Reactor - the most common type of nuclear reactor in the world. Colin Tucker has spent the last thirty years keeping reactors safe. Join him on a tour that is the next best thing to driving a nuclear reactor yourself!

✦ Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements
Contents
1: One Man and His Dog
1.1 Reading This Book Won’t Qualify You to Drive a Nuclear Reactor
1.2 What This Book Covers
1.3 The Three Key Concepts
1.4 And Finally…
2: Physics Is Phun!
2.1 Atoms and Nuclei
2.2 Fission
2.3 Fast and Slow Neutrons
2.4 Chain Reactions
3: Being Friendly to Neutrons
3.1 Introducing Reactivity
3.2 Niles and milliNiles…
3.3 Your Reactor’s Fuel
3.4 Your Control Rods
3.5 The Boiling ‘Point’ of Water
4: Criticality Is Not as Bad as It Sounds
4.1 Criticality: One of Science-Fiction’s Biggest Mistakes
4.2 Starting Subcritical: A Shutdown Reactor
4.3 Approaching Criticality
4.4 Supercriticality: Also Not a Problem
4.5 Prompt and Delayed Neutrons
4.6 Chicago Pile 1 (CP-1)
5: What Makes Nuclear Special?
5.1 A Compact Source of Energy
5.2 Fission Products
5.3 Decay Heat
5.4 The Worst That Could Happen
6: The Thing You Put Your Reactor in…
6.1 The Reactor Pressure Vessel
6.2 The Steam Generators
6.3 The Reactor Coolant Pumps
6.4 The Pressuriser
6.5 Putting It All Together
6.6 Inside the ‘Can’
6.7 A Sense of Scale
7: Pull the Rods Out and Stand Back
7.1 Where Do You Start?
7.2 Are You Protected?
7.3 Predicting Criticality
7.4 Changing Boron
7.5 First Steps
7.6 Approach to Criticality
7.7 Waiting for Criticality…
7.8 Doubling Time and Start-Up Rate
7.9 Where to Next…?
8: Watt Power?
8.1 Three Problems with Flux
8.2 Nitrogen-16
8.3 Using Heat (Primary Circuit)
8.4 Using Heat (Secondary Circuit)
8.5 What Doesn’t Work
8.6 Back to Fissions
9: Your Reactor Is Stable (Part One)
9.1 Fuel Temperature
9.2 Moderator Temperature
9.3 It’s a PWR, so It’s Stable
9.4 Another Coefficient
9.5 Chernobyl Reactor Number 4, 26th April 1986
9.6 Remember That You Have a PWR
10: You’ve Got to Do Something with All that Steam
10.1 Steam Generators: Viewed from the Other Side…
10.2 Main Steam Lines
10.3 Steam Turbines
10.4 The High Pressure Turbine
10.5 Re-using the Steam
10.6 The Condensers
10.7 The Way Back
10.8 The Generator
10.9 The Big View of the Power Station Cooling Circuits
11: The Big Red Button…
11.1 What Next?
11.2 Trips and Scrams…
11.3 What Makes a Good Control Room?
11.4 How Many Reactors?
12: Your Reactor Is Stable (Part Two)
12.1 Steam Generator Conditions
12.2 Heat Transfer
12.3 A Practical Example: A Small Change in Electrical Power
12.4 Keeping on Program
12.5 Steam Dumping
12.6 And Finally… Boron
12.7 Routine Dilutions
13: Putting a Spin on It
13.1 Stable at Low Power
13.2 Supporting Your Turbine
13.3 Spinning-Up
13.4 Synchronising
13.5 Turbine Power Raising
14: Going Up!
14.1 Reactor Power Raising
14.2 Power Defect
14.3 Power Shape
14.4 Iodine and Xenon
14.5 Xenon Build-Up
14.6 Xenon After a Trip
14.7 January Sales
15: Power, and How to Change It
15.1 The Toolkit
15.2 Practical Example: A Significant Power Reduction
15.3 What You Really Do
15.4 Controlling Axial Power Shape
15.5 And Xenon
15.6 Flexible Operation
15.7 Load Following
15.8 Taking the Long View
16: Steady Power with Nothing to Do?
16.1 The ‘Q’ Word?
16.2 Burning-Up
16.3 Primary Circuit
16.4 Steam Generators
16.5 Steam Demand
16.6 What Else Might You Be Doing?
16.7 Predicting Criticality
17: It’s All About Safety
17.1 The Interview
17.2 Building a Bridge
17.3 Safety Cases
17.4 What Can Go Wrong with Your PWR?
17.5 The Three ‘C’s
17.6 Automatic Protection
17.7 Engineered Safety Features
17.8 How Safe Is ‘Safe Enough’?
17.9 The Windscale Fire
17.10 International Perspectives
17.11 Tolerable Risk
17.12 Just a Small One…
18: What Can Go Wrong (and What You Can Do About It)
18.1 Can You Cope?
18.2 Fault 1: A Loss of Grid
18.3 Natural Circulation
18.4 Batteries and Back-Up Generators
18.5 Pumps etc.
18.6 Recovering from a Loss of Grid
18.7 Fault 2: A Large Break Loss of Coolant Accident (LB LOCA)
18.8 Safety Injection (SI)
19: Smaller Isn’t Always Easier
19.1 Fault 3: A Small Loss of Coolant Accident
19.2 The Operator’s Choice
19.3 Finding a Balance
19.4 Moving On, Moving Down
19.5 Small LOCA, Big Problem
19.6 Fault 4: Steam Generator Tube Leak (SGTL)
19.7 How Is That Acceptable?
20: What Else Can Go Wrong?
20.1 Fault 5: Main Steam Line Break (MSLB)
20.2 Fault 6: Severe Accidents
20.3 Fukushima Daiichi
20.4 In the Longer Term
20.5 The Best Way to Deal with a Severe Accident…
21: When You Run Out of Oomph
21.1 Coast-Down
21.2 Shutting Down
21.3 Cooling Down
21.4 Reactor Coolant Pumps
21.5 Boron
21.6 The Chemists Are in Charge
21.7 Cooling When Cooled Down
21.8 Lifting the Lid
21.9 Defuelling, Shuffling, Refuelling
21.10 The Way Back
21.11 Physics Testing
21.12 Afterwards
22: Other Reactor Designs Are Available
22.1 A Little Bit of History
22.2 Pressurised Water Reactors (PWRs)
22.3 Boiling Water Reactors
22.4 CANDU Reactors
22.5 MAGNOX Reactors
22.6 Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactors (AGRs)
22.7 RBMK Reactors
22.8 Fast Reactors
22.9 Thorium
22.10 The Paper Reactors
22.11 And the Winner Is?
22.12 Don’t Just Take My Word for It…
23: How to Build Your Own Reactor
23.1 First the Fuel
23.2 Plutonium
23.3 Enriched Uranium
23.4 The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT)
23.5 Natural Uranium
23.6 It’s Not Going to Happen
23.7 Has Anyone Ever Tried?
24: And There’s More…
24.1 One Small Book
24.2 Not Just Operations
24.3 Spent Fuel…
24.4 …and Radioactive Wastes
24.5 At the End of the Day
24.6 Off the Grid?
24.7 Books, Accidents and Weapons
24.8 The Politics and the Campaigning
25: Conclusion
Picture Credits and Sources
Index

✦ Subjects

Science; Physics; General; Technology & Engineering; Power Resources; Nuclear; Machinery; Atomic & Molecular; Electrical