Core design studies for a 1000MWth Advanced Burner Reactor

Kim, T.K.; Yang, Won Sik; Grandy, C.; Hill, R. N.

doi:10.1016/j.anucene.2008.12.021

Cited by 58 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…These studies indicate that this option demands a reactor core having a size >1000 MWth. (Kim et al 2008) …”

Section: Assessment Of Startup Fuel Options For the Gnep Advanced Burmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Assessment of Startup Fuel Options for the GNEP Advanced Burner Reactor (ABR)

Carmack¹,

Pasamehmetoglu²,

Alberstein³

2008

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“…These studies indicate that this option demands a reactor core having a size >1000 MWth. (Kim et al 2008) …”

Section: Assessment Of Startup Fuel Options For the Gnep Advanced Burmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Binary metal alloy fuel has a higher fuel smear density that UOx fuel and hence the reactor design studies indicate that this core could be as small as 800 MWth under this option (Kim et al 2008). …”

Section: Enriched U-zr Alloymentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of Startup Fuel Options for the GNEP Advanced Burner Reactor (ABR)

Carmack¹,

Pasamehmetoglu²,

Alberstein³

2008

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“…The following engineering constraints are applied throughout the analysis: (1) the coolant pressure drop across the core, including the 1.9 m long fission gas plenum plus the pressure drop at the core inlet and outlet, is constrained to 0.9 MPa; (2) the coolant inlet temperature is 355°C, and it increases by 155°C across the active core (Dubberley et al, 2000); (3) the maximum sodium coolant velocity is 12 m/s (Qvist and Greenspan, 2014); (4) the inner cladding temperature should be lower than 650°C -the eutectic point of the HT-9 and plutonium mixture -and the fuel centerline temperature is conservatively constrained to 800°C (Hofman et al, 1997); (5) the peak radiation damage Table 2 Composition of the TRU from LWR's UNF at discharge burnup of 50 MWd/kg and 10-year cooling (Kim et al, 2009 Table 1 Dimensions and composition of the components in the reference ultra-long cycle S&B core (Zhang et al, 2017 G. Zhang et al Progress in Nuclear Energy 106 (2018) [440][441][442][443][444][445][446][447][448][449][450][451][452][453][454] in the cladding of both seed and blanket is limited to 200 DPA that, currently, is the acceptable constraint based on the data obtained in the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) (Leggett and Walters, 1993); (6) there is no hard limit for the burnup reactivity swing (defined as Δk/k, where k is the core effective multiplication factor and Δk is the difference between its maximum and minimum value during an equilibrium cycle); nevertheless it is desirable to limit the reactivity swing to ∼3.5%. The larger the burnup reactivity swing, the greater is the required number of control assemblies because the reactivity worth of a single control assembly is set to be less than $1.0 for safety considerations.…”

Section: Design Constraintsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A uniform sodium density of 0.849 g/cm 3 is set throughout; it corresponds to an average coolant temperature of 700 K. The seed of the S&B cores evaluated in Section 3 is designed to have a TRU CR of 0.5 at the Beginning of Equilibrium Cycle (BOEC); this is consistent with the CR of the representative ABR chosen for the recent Fuel Cycle Evaluation and Screening campaign (Wigeland et al, 2014). The seed fuel is managed as in a conventional ABR (Kim et al, 2009;Hoffman et al, 2006): at the end of each cycle, a fraction of the seed fuel is discharged and recycled; the fuel assemblies that remain in the seed are not shuffled. It is assumed that the heavy metals are fully recovered and recycled into fresh seed fuel assemblies after being mixed with the makeup fuel-depleted uranium and TRU from PWR UNF ( Table 2).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Improved resource utilization by advanced burner reactors with breed-and-burn blankets

Zhang

Fratoni

Greenspan

2018

Progress in Nuclear Energy

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A B S T R A C TPrevious studies assessed the feasibility of designing Sodium-cooled Fast Reactors (SFR) in a novel Seed-andBlanket (S&B) configuration in which a significant fraction of the core power is generated by a radial metallic thorium-fueled blanket that operates in the Breed-and-Burn (B&B) mode. The radiation damage on the cladding material in both seed and blanket does not exceed the presently acceptable constraint of 200 Displacements per Atom (DPA). This paper investigates a number of blanket fuel options other than metallic thorium fuel, including thorium dioxide fuel, thorium hydride fuel, thorium nitride Fully Ceramic Encapsulated (FCM) fuel, and Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) Used Nuclear Fuel (UNF) after limited reprocessing. Since the neutron spectrum of the oxide fueled blanket is softer than that of the reference metallic thorium fueled blanket, it can discharge its fuel at an average burnup of around 110 MWd/kg versus 65 MWd/kg of the metallic thorium. The two thorium hydride fueled blankets feature an even softer neutron spectrum than the oxide fueled blanket and, therefore, a higher average discharge burnup -192 MWd/kg and 245 MWd/kg when the H-to-Th ratio is, respectively, 0.5 and 2.0. The FCM fuel is composed of SiC matrix and cladding that is expected to self-anneal the neutrons induced damage. With the assumption that the FCM fuel will indeed be proven not limited by radiation damage, its discharge burnup could be up to 482 MWd/kg. As a result, the corresponding thorium utilization is the highest of all options examined -close to 80 times the utilization of natural uranium in present Light Water Reactors (LWRs). The amount of Trans-Th isotopes accumulated in the thorium blanket per unit of generated electricity decreases as the blanket fuel is discharged at a higher burnup. Therefore, a higher discharge blanket burnup results in lower long-term radioactivity and radiotoxicity. It is also found that the 232 U/ 233 U ratio in the discharged thorium fuel is over 3 times higher in the thorium hydride than in the other blankets thus improving the thorium-hydride blanket's proliferation resistance. Softening of the blanket spectrum leads to softening of the seed spectrum region interfacing with the blanket and this enables to discharge the seed fuel at a higher average burnup. The higher discharge burnup of the seed fuel reduces the required reprocessing and fuel fabrication capacities per unit of generated electricity. The cores having softer neutron spectrum blankets also feature less positive feedback to sodium voiding and much more negative Doppler coefficient. When PWR UNF is used after limited reprocessing to fuel the blanket, the subcritical blanket driven by the excess neutrons from the seed can discharge this fuel at an average burnup of ∼120 MWd/kg. Combined with the burnup in the first stage PWRs, this two-stage energy system can achieve an accumulated uranium burnup of ∼170 MWd/kg. This increases the fuel utilization of natural uranium by a factor of three relative to oncethroug...

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“…Recently, under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) project, ANL has developed 1000 MWt Advanced Burner Reactor (ABR-1000) with U-TRU-Zr ternary metal alloy fuel (Kim et al, 2009). Japan also has been studying the metal fuel core concept (Uematsu et al, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparative study on neutronics characteristics of a 1500 MWe metal fuel sodium-cooled fast reactor

Ohgama

Aliberti

Stauff

et al. 2017

Mechanical Engineering Journal

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Under the cooperative effort of the Civil Nuclear Energy R&D Working Group within the framework of the U.S.-Japan bilateral, Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) have been performing benchmark study using the Japan Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (JSFR) design with metal fuel. In this benchmark study, core characteristic parameters at the beginning of cycle were evaluated by the best estimate deterministic and stochastic methodologies of ANL and JAEA. The results obtained by both institutions show a good agreement with less than 200 pcm of discrepancy in the neutron multiplication factor, and less than 3% of discrepancy in the sodium void reactivity, Doppler reactivity, and control rod worth. The results by the stochastic and deterministic approaches were compared in each party to investigate impacts of the deterministic approximation and to understand potential variations in the results due to different calculation methodologies employed. From the detailed analysis of methodologies, it was found that the good agreement in the multiplication factor from the deterministic calculations comes from the cancellation of the differences in the methodology (0.4%) and nuclear data (0.6%). The different treatment in reflector cross section generation was estimated as the major cause of the discrepancy between the multiplication factors by the JAEA and ANL deterministic methodologies. Impacts of the nuclear data libraries were also investigated using a sensitivity analysis methodology. The differences in the inelastic scattering cross sections of U-238, ν values and fission cross sections of Pu-239 and μ-average of Na-23 are the major contributors to the difference in the multiplication factors.

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Core design studies for a 1000MWth Advanced Burner Reactor

Cited by 58 publications

References 3 publications

Assessment of Startup Fuel Options for the GNEP Advanced Burner Reactor (ABR)

Assessment of Startup Fuel Options for the GNEP Advanced Burner Reactor (ABR)

Improved resource utilization by advanced burner reactors with breed-and-burn blankets

Comparative study on neutronics characteristics of a 1500 MWe metal fuel sodium-cooled fast reactor

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