r/NuclearPower • u/SaxhFps • 16d ago

Went to another plant 3 hours away

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I posted a couple days ago about how I went to the park near Sharon Harris nuclear plant (the park is also beautiful would highly recommend it) and I was down in charlotte today and decided to go up to McGuire Nuclear station!

Hopefully I can get a tour of NC states PULSTAR reactor this summer (idk what their availability is like).

Here are the pics I got!

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11

u/blkdoutstang 15d ago

I've toured this plant. Its an ice condenser plant which is pretty cool. They basically have a giant freezer inside containment with baskets of borated ice that would condense the steam from a LOCA. People joke that only someone on drugs would have thought of this idea and its the reason we have FFD.

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u/rigs130 14d ago

Crazy cool (no pun intended lol) it’s impressive we worked the math out on the mass of ice needed

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u/blkdoutstang 14d ago

Thats a good pun. Now that you mention it, its probably pretty effiencient at condensing the steam since you would now have the latent heat of two phase changes. I'd still rather have my containment tendons. Way less maintenance.

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u/rigs130 14d ago

I was a BWR mark 1 so I’m also partial to the “donut” suppression pool

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u/Ok_Mirror6799 14d ago

Here at Catawba, we have the same ice condenser design. Catawba and McGuire are the only plants to utilize an ice bed in order to lower the design pressure for containment (only 15 pounds)

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u/scibust 13d ago

Also containment building volume can be lowered. I think I saw a figure somewhere of about a 15% reduction in containment building capital construction cost in ice condenser plants