Effect of Fuel Type on the Attainable Power of the Encapsulated Nuclear Heat Source Reactor
- Department of Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)
The Encapsulated Nuclear Heat Source (ENHS) is a small liquid metal cooled fast reactor that features uniform composition core, at least 20 effective full power years of operation without refueling, nearly zero burnup reactivity swing and heat removal by natural circulation. A number of cores have been designed over the last few years to provide the first three of the above features. The objective of this work is to find to what extent use of nitride fuel, with either natural or enriched nitrogen, affects the attainable power as compared to the reference metallic fueled core. All the compared cores use the same fuel rod diameter, D, and length but differ in the lattice pitch, P, and Pu weight percent. Whereas when using Pb-Bi eutectic for both primary and intermediate coolants the P/D of the metallic fueled core is 1.36, P/D for the nitride cores are, respectively, 1.21 for natural nitrogen and 1.45 for enriched nitrogen. A simple one-dimensional thermal hydraulic model has been developed for the ENHS reactor. Applying this model to the different designs it was found that when the IHX length is at its reference value of 10.4 m, the power that can be removed by natural circulation using nitride fuel with natural nitrogen is 65% of the reference power of 125 MWth that is attainable using metallic fuel. However, using enriched nitrogen the attainable power is 110% of the reference. To get 125 MWth the effective IHX length need be 8.7 m and 30.5 m for, respectively, enriched and natural nitrogen nitride fuel designs. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 21021056
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 2006 International congress on advances in nuclear power plants - ICAPP'06, Reno - Nevada (United States), 4-8 Jun 2006; Other Information: Country of input: France; 5 refs; Related Information: In: Proceedings of the 2006 international congress on advances in nuclear power plants - ICAPP'06, 2734 pages.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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