A Control System for a Gas-Cooled Nuclear Power Plant

A major consideration in the control of a nuclear power plant such as the Experimental Gas-Cooled Reactor is the regulation of both the temperature and pressure of the steam entering the turbine. This paper describes a control system which varies the primary coolant flow and reactor Dower to make the plant produce steam at the required conditions of temperature and pressure over a wide range of steam flows. Analog computer studies showed. that the control system was able to make the simulated plant smoothly follow both large changes of turbine load (changing at a rate of 10% per minute) and small rapid changes of load (l% per second) while limiting the transient variations in steam conditions to acceptable values.