How to Drive a Nuclear Reactor by Colin Tucker

Author:Colin Tucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030338763
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

13.5 Turbine Power Raising

When you first synchronised your turbine to the grid, the governor valves will have allowed just enough steam into the turbine to generate a few tens of MW of electricity. It’s not a lot compared with your full power of 1200 MW, but it will ensure that your turbine is continuously pushing against the grid. If you didn’t do this, the grid could drive the generator as if it was an electric motor—and this could lead to overheating.

Your steam dump valves will have closed a little to compensate for the steam that’s now being used to drive the turbine, but you’re probably still dumping steam. To close the dump valves, raise turbine power (by opening the governor valves a bit) until all of the steam being produced in your SGs is being used to drive the turbine. Your dump valves will have closed. Now your reactor and turbine are balanced at low power, and you’re finally getting paid (a little) for electricity.

The next step is to raise both reactor power and turbine power up to your full power limits. This isn’t quick. Just as when you were spinning your turbine up to 1500 rpm, your turbine could be damaged if you try to change its power output too quickly. Some turbines are better at faster power changes than others. Yours is typical, able to increase power at just a few MW per minute. This means it’s going to take you somewhere between 5 and 10 h to reach full power, assuming that there aren’t any limits on the reactor that would force you to move more slowly.

Modern turbine governor valves are controlled by computers. Once the turbine is synchronised to the grid, you only need to type in a target load (in MW) and a rate at which you want to get there, and the computer will do the rest, monitoring vibrations, expansions and any other concerns as it goes along.

You’ve already learnt that your PWR will follow steam demand, so it looks like all you have to do to raise the power on the reactor is to tell the computer operating the turbine to increase its output? Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated than that, as you’ll see in the next chapter.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.