One of the key enhancement areas for the ACR-1000 lies in the simplification of the design, a feature that often arose in customer engagement meetings. This table shows examples of design simplifications for improved operability and maintainability, that are attractive to a customer.

ACR-1000 Design Simplification

• Light water coolant allows elimination of systems for coolant heavy water cleanup and recovery; and simplifies containment atmosphere cleanup systems.
• Stable reactor physics characteristics allow simpler control mechanism design (eliminating adjustor rods and liquid zone controller mechanisms).
• Simpler arrangements to set up “Guaranteed Shutdown State” (GSS) used in Maintenance outages.
• Light water coolant enables simpler connection with Emergency Core Coolant (ECC) System—replaces 16 large motor-operated, safety-qualified injection valves with passive check valves and simplifies coolant system/ECC system interface components.
• Quadrant-based safety and heat sink system layout design, with additional redundancy in actuating signals, simplifies on-power maintenance and testing.
• More durable feeder materials and robust design margins for fuel channels simplify inspections.
• Computerized testing of major safety systems and automatic calibration of in-core detectors control signals reduce both online testing and startup testing time.
• Fuelling machines improved to speed up de-fuelling of fuel channels for pressure tube in-service inspection.
• Ventilation systems allow main airlock doors to be open during an outage, thus allowing much faster movement of personnel, without risk of airborne contamination spread.
• Maintenance-based design provides required space allocation, reduction in temporary scaffolds and hoists; provisions for electrical, water and air supplies built-in for on-power and normal shutdown maintenance.
• Containment dousing system eliminated.
• Reduced number of trip parameters.
• Reduced number of sensors due to (permitted) sharing between systems.

An “ACR-1000 Technical Summary - An Evolution of CANDU” is now available in hardcopy or CD format. The ACR-1000 Technical Summary provides a brief description of the main features of an ACR-1000 two-unit plant including overall plant design, major systems and key components.

Please contact info@aecl.ca for your copy of the ACR-1000 Technical Summary, or more information on ACR-1000.