Use of multiple reheat helium brayton cycles to eliminate the intermediate heat transfer loop for advanced loop type SFRs

The sodium intermediate heat transfer loop is used in existing sodium cooled fast reactor (SFR) plant design as a necessary safety measure to separate the radioactive primary loop sodium from the water of the steam Rankine power cycle. However, the intermediate heat transfer loop significantly increases the SFR plant cost and decreases the plant reliability due to the relatively high possibility of sodium leakage. A previous study shows that helium Brayton cycles with multiple reheat and intercooling for SFRs with reactor outlet temperature in the range of 510°C to 650°C can achieve thermal efficiencies comparable to or higher than steam cycles or recently proposed supercritical CO₂ cycles. Use of inert helium as the power conversion working fluid provides major advantages over steam or CO₂ by removing the requirement for safety systems to prevent and mitigate the sodium-water or sodium-CO₂ reactions. A helium Brayton cycle power conversion system therefore makes the elimination of the intermediate heat transfer loop possible. This paper presents a pre-conceptual design of multiple reheat helium Brayton cycle for an advanced loop type SFR. This design widely refers the new horizontal shaft distributed PBMR helium power conversion design features. For a loop type SFR with reactor outlet temperature 550°C, the design achieves 42.4% thermal efficiency with favorable power density comparing with high temperature gas cooled reactors.