Feasibility of Water Cooled Thorium Breeder Reactor Based on LWR Technology
- Research Laboratory for Nuclear Reactors, Tokyo Institute of Technology 2-12-1, O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8550 (Japan)
The feasibility of Th-{sup 233}U fueled, homogenous breeder reactor based on matured conventional LWR technology was studied. The famous demonstration at Shipping-port showed that the Th-{sup 233}U fueled, heterogeneous PWR with four different lattice fuels was possible to breed fissile but its low averaged burn-up including blanket fuel and the complicated core configuration were not suitable for economically competitive reactor. The authors investigated the wide design range in terms of fuel cell design, power density, averaged discharge burn-up, etc. to determine the potential of water-cooled Th reactor as a competitive breeder. It is found that a low moderated (MFR=0.3) H{sub 2}O-cooled reactor with comparable burn-up with current LWR is feasible to breed fissile fuel but the core size is too large to be economical because of the low pellet power density. On the other hand, D{sub 2}O-cooled reactor shows relatively wider feasible design window, therefore it is possible to design a core having better neutronic and economic performance than H{sub 2}O-cooled. Both coolant-type cores show negative void reactivity coefficient while achieving breeding capability which is a distinguished characteristics of thorium based fuel breeder reactor. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 20979761
- 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; 15 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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