The design and simulation of a new spent fuel pool passive cooling system

• A novel completely passive spent fuel pool cooling system is proposed.
• The cooling ability of this system is 16 MW.
• High efficiency heat pipe is introduced to decay heat removal.
• Numerical models for completely passive spent fuel pool cooling system are developed.

Due to the safety issues arising from the Fukushima accident, a novel completely passive spent fuel pool cooling system is proposed using the high-efficiency heat pipe cooling technology that is available in an emergency condition such as a station blackout. This cooling system’s ability to remove the decay heat released by the spent fuel assemblies is evaluated by a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. The spent fuel pool of CAP1400 (a passive PWR developed in China) is selected as the reference pool, and the passive cooling system is designed for this spent fuel pool. The pool with the passive cooling system is simulated using Fluent 13.0 with 4 million meshes. Four different cases have been studied, and some notable results have been obtained through this work. The simulation results reveal that the passive cooling system effectively removes the decay heat from the SFP with the storage of 15-year-old spent fuel assemblies and prevents the burnout of the fuel rods. The results indicate that the water in the SFP will never boil, even in a severe accident with a lack of emergency power and outside aid.