Here’s a bit more about the concept as I see it now.
In this scenario, the heavily contaminated water (W1) would be drawn (hot and contaminated) from the reactor to an evap unit where it can be flashed and quenched in a perverted sort of vacuum distillation. A critical point is that our input water is very hot, whereas in most evaps it is cold, requiring significant energy to maintain the process. It should be very easy to flash W1 directly into steam, and even more critically, the steam is mostly clean. A portion of W1 will flash to steam, and a portion of that will be drawn off for separate condensation as W2, and we have reduced the volume of W1 while increasing its concentration of contamination. We also must cool the remaining W1 before returning it to containment. We certainly
W2 should be considered mildly contaminated, which seems to be what the current decontamination equipment is capable of dealing with.
Typical well-engineered multi-stage evaps draw about 15% of input for condensation as output. We are going to engineer this poorly and quickly, focusing on bone-simple and robust reliability, and operator useability rather than efficiency. We’ll build more, quickly, and stack them up in the parking lot. Say we achieve only 5%. This means that we return only 95% of what we withdrew from containment.
This process cannot be continued indefinitely, as even with replacement coling water helping to dilute the concentration of contamination within the containment, I think it is safe to asume that the fuel in there will more than replenish the contamination of the water. After
