The study of passive cooling system assisted with separate heat pipe for decay heat removal in spent fuel pool

The nuclear energy plays an important role in world energy production, and the safety of nuclear power plant has drawn increasing attention as well, where the decay heat removal system is an essential part of nuclear plants to ensure its passive safety. This paper aims to propose the way to achieve entirely passive cooling for spent fuel pool. A separate heat pipe assisted passive cooling system with a large cooling capability of 16 MW is discussed, which focuses on passive cooling in the condenser section by mean of natural draft air cooling. After comparing several condenser section configurations, the optimization of the cooling system is discussed to meet the demands of both high-efficiency heat transfer and economic feasibility. In order to find an overall optimal solution for the passive cooling system with the minimum cost, the multi-objective optimization method is employed to investigate a set of system parameters.