Pickering CANDU reactor

Fig. 10.3. Flow diagram for Pickering CANDU reactor (courtesy of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited).

The success of the CANDU reactor depends on maintaining heavy-water losses at a low level. Experience (64) at Pickering and Bruce confirms that losses can be kept to less than 1% of the total inventory per year. Elaborate recovery systems are provided to deal with heavy-water leakage. Most important has been the development of large reliable and eflBcient molecular sieve drying systems to recover heavy-water vapor from the air in various parts of the reactor building (65). 

Reactor-physics parameters have been measured for I O-moderated, natural-VO lattices similar to those planned for the SOO-MWe CANDU- reactors at Pickering, Ontario. ... 

Ontario Hydro s ei t large CANDU reactors on the shore of Lake Ontario at Pickering... 

Figure A1.26 Simplified flow diagram of SIS-MW, CANDU reactor NPP (Pickering Power Plant, Ontario, Canada) (AECL Report, 1969) these 515-MWei CANDU reactors are the smallest ones in Canada, and first two of them were put into operation in 1971. 

The reactor fission product and fissionable nuclear material isotopic production and decay were simulated using the SAS2H/ORIGEN-S sequence of SCALE. It was necessary to calculate these inventories to determine the impact on the core neutron multiplication constant, keff. It was determined that after 381 days of the proposed reactor operation at 7.2MW (2740 MWd) with its 2.88 MTU core (951 MWd/MTU), the quantities of fission products and fissionable nuclear materials that are produced in the proposed reactor have negligible effect ( 1% in keff) on the core reactivity. Additionally, there is sufficient excess reactivity (i.e., 6% keff) to compensate for the xenon that is produced. The quantity of fission products and fissionable nuclear materials (e.g., 1.98 kg Pu) produced in the proposed reactor are equivalent to those produced in a CANDU reactor (i.e., Pickering-7) after about 1.8 days of operation at 15 MW. 

A short summary of the principal features of the four types of cooling discussed above is given in Table 10.1. This is followed by a detailed description of the CANDU-PHW reactor at Pickering Point in Ontario. 

Let us consider the Canadian reactors of the CANDU-PWR type presently being built at Pickering. The Canadian General Electric has proposed a vertical version for these reactors, with the same channel and the same fuel (ref. 6). Let us see what would happen if pressurized heavy water was replaced by boiling light water in the channel. 

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