Pressurizer (nuclear power)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A pressurizer is a component of a pressurized water reactor. The basic design of the pressurized water reactor includes a requirement that the coolant (water) in the reactor coolant system must not boil. Put another way, the coolant must remain in the liquid state at all times, especially in the reactor vessel. To achieve this, the coolant in the reactor coolant system is maintained at a pressure sufficiently high that boiling does not occur at the coolant temperatures experienced while the plant is operating or in any analyzed possible transient state. To pressurize the coolant system to a higher pressure than the vapor pressure of the coolant at operating temperatures, a separate pressurizing system is required. This is in the form of the pressurizer.
In a pressurized water reactor plant, the pressurizer is a cylindrical pressure vessel with hemispherical ends, mounted with the long axis vertical and directly connected by a single run of piping to the reactor coolant system. It is located inside the reactor containment building. Although the water in the pressurizer is the same reactor coolant as in the rest of the reactor coolant system, and therefore stagnant, i.e. reactor coolant does not flow through the pressurizer continuously as it does in the other parts of the reactor coolant system. Because of its innate incompressibility, water in a connected piping system adjusts equally to pressure changes anywhere in the connected system. The water in the system may not be at the same pressure at all points in the system due to differences in elevation but the pressure responds equally to a change in any one part of the system. From this phenomenon, it was recognized early on that the pressure in the entire reactor coolant system, including the reactor itself, could be controlled by controlling pressure in a small interconnected area of the system and this led to the design of the pressurizer. The pressurizer is a small vessel compared to the other two major vessels of the reactor coolant system, the reactor vessel itself and the steam generator(s).