Description and identification of difficulties arising from the application of a cleaning process in operating conditions for the treatment of components used on liquid metal fast reactors (LMFR). A technical designed approach to avoid these situations

The cleaning process is one of the major maintenance operation for liquid metal fast reactors (LMFRs), both in operation and in their decommissioning stage. Russian and French cleaning processes are briefly described, including problems which have arisen during the processes. It appears that the cause of these problems is always connected to bad draining of the component, resulting in a vigorous reaction between vapour or liquid water and the bulk of sodium. From this discussion, the paper makes major recommendations for the efficient and safe cleaning of sodium wetted components, and proposes several processes which should be developed in order to deal with difficult situations, for example the removal of large amounts of undrainable sodium.     

Production of fire extinguishing mixture by solid propellant propulsion

The behavior of fire suppression by water mist spray has been studied by using the experimental setup which employs the double-based solid propellant gas generator for water mist production. The burning products of solid fuel form a supersonic flow injected through the nozzle into the diffuser chamber having input for the water component ejected from the storage. High values of temperature and pressure at stagnation point impart the substantial kinetic energy to the flow, which provides the atomization of water droplets into mist spray. Since the water evaporation occurs already in the diffuser chamber due to the high temperature of input gas flow, the droplet size is gradually decreases to the lower limit value that could ever exist. The presence of vapor phase enlarges the volume of fire extinguishing jet allowing it to operate as a flooding agent (along with the effect of heat consumption due to water evaporation) at the very beginning of fire suppression process, much before the water droplets evaporation by the flame itself. Proposed technique of the water mist production has showed noticeable fire suppression capability through the series of testing application to the gasoline and wood model fire sources.