Investigation of decontamination characteristics of a serial multiple pool scrubber system for consequence mitigation of severe accidents

Abstract

A pool scrubber is often used as a wet-type design to mitigate the consequence of a severe nuclear accident. While studies indicated higher decontamination performance of a deeper pool, utilizing a very tall pool can be problematic due to potential structural stability and water backflow issues. This study proposes, as an alternative to a single pool system, a pool scrubber system composed of serially connected multiple pools with lower heights. Since large fraction of aerosol removal takes place in the injection region, serially connected pool scrubber system is expected to enhance the overall decontamination capability of a pool scrubber system. To support the analysis of the proposed system's decontamination capability, a new computer model was developed in the study to describe the bubble size dependent effect on aerosol removal including the effect of pool residence time. The accuracy of the new model was examined against experimental data for its validation. The proposed scrubber system composed of serially connected multiple shorter pools is found to have much improved decontamination performance over the current single pool system design.