More sustainable nuclear power generation might be achieved by combining the passive safety and high temperature applications of the Pebble Bed Reactor (PBR) design with the resource availability and favourable waste characteristics of the thorium fuel cycle. It has already been known that breeding can be achieved with the thorium fuel cycle inside a Pebble Bed Reactor if reprocessing is performed. This is also demonstrated in this work for a cylindrical core with a central driver zone, with 3 g heavy metal pebbles for enhanced fission, surrounded by a breeder zone containing 30 g thorium pebbles, for enhanced conversion. The main question of the present work is whether it is also possible to combine passive safety and breeding, within a practical operating regime, inside a thorium Pebble Bed Reactor. Therefore, the influence of several fuel design, core design and operational parameters upon the conversion ratio and passive safety is evaluated. A Depressurized Loss of Forced Cooling (DLOFC) is considered the worst safety scenario that can occur within a PBR. So, the response to a DLOFC with and without scram is evaluated for several breeder PBR designs using a coupled DALTON/THERMIX code scheme. With scram it is purely a heat transfer problem (THERMIX) demonstrating the decay heat removal capability of the design. In case control rods cannot be inserted, the temperature feedback of the core should also be able to counterbalance the reactivity insertion by the decaying xenon without fuel temperatures exceeding 1600°C. Results show that high conversion ratios (CR > 0.96) and passive safety can be combined in a thorium PBR within a practical operating regime, which means a thermal power of 100 MW or higher, 1000 days total residence time of the breeder pebbles and fuel pebble handling times longer than 14.5 s, like in the HTR-PM. With an increased U-233 content of the fresh driver pebbles (18 w%), breeding (CR = 1.0135) can already be achieved for a 220 cm core and 80 cm driver zone radius. While the decay heat removal is sufficient in this design, the temperature feedback of the undermoderated driver pebbles is too weak to compensate the reactivity insertion due to the xenon decay during a DLOFC without scram. With a lower U-233 content per driver pebble (10 w%) it was found possible to combine breeding (CR = 1.0036) and passive safety for a 300 cm core and 100 cm driver zone radius, but this does require more than a doubling of the pebble handling speed and a high reprocessing rate of the fuel pebbles. The maximum fuel temperature during a DLOFC without scram was simulated to be 1481°C for this design, still quite a bit below the TRISO failure temperature. The maximum reactivity insertion due to an ingress of water vapour is also limited with a value of +1497 pcm.
The present work investigates the running-in phase of a 100 MW th Passively Safe Thorium Breeder Pebble Bed Reactor (PBR), a conceptual design introduced in previous equilibrium core design studies by the authors. Since U-233 is not available in nature, an alternative fuel, e.g. U-235/U-238, is required to start such a reactor. This work investigates how long it takes to converge to the equilibrium core composition and to achieve a net production of U-233, and how this can be accelerated. For this purpose, a fast and flexible calculation scheme was developed to analyze these aspects of the running-in phase. Depletion equations with an axial fuel movement term are solved in MATLAB for the most relevant actinides (Th-232, Pa-233, U-233, U-234, U-235, U-236 and U-238) and the fission products are lumped into a fission product pair. A finite difference discretization is used for the axial coordinate in combination with an implicit Euler time discretization scheme. Results show that a time dependent adjustment scheme for the enrichment (in case of U-235/U-238 start-up fuel) or U-233 weight fraction of the feed driver fuel helps to restrict excess reactivity, to improve the fuel economy and to achieve a net production of U-233 faster. After using U-235/U-238 startup fuel for 1300 days, the system starts to work as a breeder, i.e. the U-233 (and Pa-233) extraction rate exceeds the U-233 feed rate, within 7 years after start of reactor operation. The final part of the work presents a basic safety analysis, which shows that the thorium PBR fulfills the same passive safety requirements as the equilibrium core during every stage of the running-in phase. The maximum fuel temperature during a Depressurized Loss of Forced Cooling (DLOFC) with scram remains below 1400°C throughout the running-in phase, quite a bit below the TRISO failure temperature of 1600°C. The uniform reactivity coefficients of cores with U-235/U-238 driver fuel are much stronger negative compared to U-233/Th driver fuel, which implies that the stronger reactivity insertion by water ingress and the reactivity addition by xenon decay during a DLOFC without scram can be compensated without fuel temperatures exceeding 1600°C.
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