Passive Hydrogen Recombination during a Beyond Design Basis Accident in a Fusion DEMO Plant

Abstract

One of the most important environmental and safety concerns in nuclear fusion plants is the confinement of radioactive substances into the reactor buildings during both normal operations and accidental conditions. For this reason, hydrogen build-up and subsequent ignition must be avoided, since the pressure and energy generated may threaten the integrity of the confinement structures, causing the dispersion of radioactive and toxic products toward the public environment. Potentially dangerous sources of hydrogen are related to the exothermal oxidation reactions between steam and plasma-facing components or hot dust, which could occur during accidents such as the in-vessel loss of coolant or a wet bypass. The research of technical solutions to avoid the risk of a hydrogen explosion in large fusion power plants is still in progress. In the safety and environment work package of the EUROfusion consortium, activities are ongoing to study solutions to mitigate the hydrogen explosion risk. The main objective is to preclude the occurrence of flammable gas mixtures. One identified solution could deal with the installation of passive autocatalytic recombiners into the atmosphere of the vacuum vessel pressure suppression system tanks. A model to control the PARs recombination capacity as a function of thermal-hydraulic parameters of suppression tanks has been modeled in MELCOR. This paper aims to test the theoretical effectiveness of the PAR intervention during an in-vessel loss of coolant accident without the intervention of the decay heat removal system for the Water-Cooled LithiumLead concept of EU-DEMO.