9 ms·
Cool may be a bit of a misnomer. you want to transfer energy (as heat) from the reactor to the generator. To do this you pump a fluid in a cycle. It picks up he
by acidburnNSA 7y ago
Cool may be a bit of a misnomer. you want to transfer energy (as heat) from the reactor to the generator. To do this you pump a fluid in a cycle. It picks up heat at the reactor and drops it off at the turbine/generator. You want the reactor to get hot and stay hot but if you didn't move the heat it would just heat up until it melted and your turbine would sit there motionless and sad.
The moving fluid is called a coolant.
- chrisseaton 7y agoBut doesn’t the normal cycle of water to the reactor and then to the turbine move heat? Why do you want to cool separately to taking useful heat energy away?
- Gwypaas 7y agoNuclear reactors have a heat efficiency of ~33% so you need to dump the remaining somewhere. That is 66% of the heat energy remain after the turbine has removed the possible mechanical energy. Just an annoying factor of Carnot's Law. If you can do district heating or similar it's all good, but you still need a permanent source of cooling capacity with enough redundancy to cool the reactor in case of an unplanned shutdown.