Casing for the fuel elements of a water-cooled nuclear reactor

Claim 1

In a water-cooled nuclear reactor having a casing for said reactor, spaced walls for said casing, a plurality of identical compartments of parallelopipedal shape in said casing, bundles of fuel elements vertically disposed in said compartments, control rods for the nuclear reactor, means for guiding said control rods in said spaced walls of said casing, means for supplying emergency coolant between said spaced walls of said casing, measuring devices for said reactor, and means for positioning said measuring device in said spaced walls of said casing, the improvement comprising said spaced casing walls being two spaced parallel metal sheets of small thickness, stiffening webs welded at intervals to and between said sheets, said webs extending between said two metal sheets to the full height of the casing and parallel to the axis of the reactor, said webs including flat arrays of vertical and tangent tubes welded in a sandwich arrangement between said two flat metal sheets, a plurality of said vertical and tangent tubes being apertured along the generating line of contact between said tubes and said flat sheets establishing communication between the interior of said tubes and the internal space of the casing compartments, and also said webs including solid metal bars of rectangular parallelopipedal shape spaced at uniform intervals and defining between said two parallel metal sheets of small thickness parallelopipedal free spaces, a plurality of orifices in said metal sheets spaced at intervals over the entire surface of said sheets for communication between said free spaces and the adjacent compartments of said casing.