A Metal Fuel Core Concept for 1000 MWt Advanced Burner Reactor
- Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 S. Cass Avenue, Argonne IL 60439 (United States)
This paper describes the core design and performance characteristics of a metal fuel core concept for a 1000 MWt Advanced Burner Reactor. A ternary metal fuel form of U-TRU-Zr was assumed with weapons grade plutonium feed for the startup core and TRU recovered from LWR spent fuel for the recycled equilibrium core. A compact burner core was developed by trade-off between the burnup reactivity loss and TRU conversion ratio, with a fixed cycle length of one-year. In the startup core, the average TRU enrichment is 15.5%, the TRU conversion ratio is 0.81, and the burnup reactivity loss over a cycle is 3.6% {delta}k. The heavy metal and TRU inventories are 13.1 and 2.0 metric tons, respectively. The average discharge burnup is 93 MWd/kg, and the TRU consumption rate is 55.5 kg/year. For the recycled equilibrium core, the average TRU enrichment is 22.1 %, the TRU conversion ratio is 0.73, and the burnup reactivity loss is 2.2% {delta}k. The TRU inventory and consumption rate are 2.9 metric tons and 81.6 kg/year, respectively. The evaluated reactivity coefficients provide sufficient negative feedbacks. The control systems provide shutdown margins that are more than adequate. The integral reactivity parameters for quasi-static reactivity balance analysis indicate favorable passive safety features, although detailed safety analyses are required to verify passive safety behavior. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 20979520
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Advanced nuclear fuel cycles and systems (GLOBAL 2007), Boise - Idaho (United States), 9-13 Sep 2007; Other Information: Country of input: France; 14 refs; Related Information: In: Proceedings of GLOBAL 2007 conference on advanced nuclear fuel cycles and systems, 1873 pages.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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