Holtec International is pleased to announce the Company has completed the preliminary design of an air cooled heat removal system for spent fuel pools that is deployable at any operating nuclear power station in addition to, or in lieu of, the traditional cooling system currently in use. The spent fuel pool cooling system design currently used in the industry utilizes a pump to circulate the pool’s hot water through a heat exchanger where the pool’s decay heat is rejected to a source of cold water across the walls of the tubes (or thin plates in a plate-type heat exchanger). The cataclysmic events at Fukushima Daiichi motivated our Company to devise an alternate pool cooling technology that rejects heat to the ambient air.
The new pool cooling system has the following key design features:
- An external source of power is not required.
- It can be installed in any fuel pool at any nuclear plant as a retrofit.
- The heat removal capacity of the cooling system can be customized to meet the thermal demand of the specific fuel pool.
- As many cooling systems can be deployed in parallel to cool a pool as deemed necessary by a plant’s owner.
The Company has determined the new cooling system, if structurally designed to withstand Fukushima’s earthquake (a most feasible design proposition), would have continued to function in the wake of the tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011.
Holtec International is a world leader in expanding the wet storage capacity of spent fuel pools. The Company has “reracked” over 80 spent fuel pools in the U.S. since 1986 (meeting virtually the entire U.S. need over the past 25 years) and has also supplied its proven storage technology to many nations that use Western LWRs, including Brazil, China (18 nuclear units), Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.
Commenting on the new pool cooling system and the disaster, Joy Russell, Holtec’s Corporate Director of Business Development, offered the following statement:
“The development of the new spent fuel pool cooling system has been helped by our decades of immersion in used fuel wet storage technology, which enabled our Company to launch an all-out effort to devise a fail-safe spent fuel pool cooling system in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe that engulfed Fukushima. Detailed design work will be performed depending on customer interest. We express our sincere condolences to the people of Japan for the horrific loss of innocent lives that the nation has suffered. Our hearts go out to the people in the country’s center-east corridor who have exhibited exemplary civility and fortitude in the face of the utter devastation unleashed on them.”