After-cooling pump

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After-cooling pumps are part of the emergency and after-cooling system of a pressurized water reactor in a nuclear power plant .

As a rule, these are multistage centrifugal pumps that are part of the concept for controlling leakage accidents , ie leaks in the reactor circuit that have to be compensated with cooling water in order to avoid core meltdown .

Because of their high safety significance, these pumps are assigned to different redundancies . If necessary, they are started automatically (but can also be started manually) and feed water with boric acid into the reactor cooling circuit from the storage tanks provided for this purpose . In another incident course there is the possibility of the suction on the bottom (floor area) containment switch, where the leaked water has accumulated. In contrast to the safety feed pumps, the after-cooling pumps belong to the low-pressure systems, i.e. feeding is only possible when the pressure in the reactor cooling circuit is low (e.g. <10 bar).

For operational dissipation of the decay heat from the reactor after a normal shutdown, there is the possibility of suction from the reactor cooling lines and cooling via the so-called reheat cooler ( heat exchanger ).