Modeling of low-temperature reduction of metal oxide in hydrogen treatment system for severe accidents in nuclear power plants

At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, zirconium in the fuel rod cladding reacted with water vapor at elevated temperatures due to a loss of cooling water, resulting in the production of a large amount of hydrogen. This hydrogen leaked from the reactor vessel and accumulated in the top of reactor building, eventually leading to an explosion. A hydrogen treatment system that re-oxidizes hydrogen to water vapor is one of the effective methods to prevent such an explosion. A prominent re-oxidation method is via a fixed bed reactor packed with metal oxide pellets. The advantages of this method are its relatively fast oxidation rate without external oxygen/air injection. In this study, experiments and complementary numerical calculations were performed on the hydrogen reoxidation reaction by metal oxides. The oxidation of hydrogen by copper oxide is modeled by 5 interacting, elementary reactions consisting of 6 chemical species. Experiments were performed using two packed bed set-ups, with measurement of inlet/outlet gas composition and pre/post-analysis of solid composition used to determine constants of the individual reaction rates for numerical calculations. From these reaction constants, the temporal behavior of the outlet gas was predicted.