A comparison of equilibrium and non-equilibrium cycle methods for Na-cooled ATW system.

Conference · Sat Mar 30 04:00:00 EST 2002

OSTI ID:795824

Kim, Y; Hill, R N; Taiwo, T A

An equilibrium cycle method, embodied in the REBUS-3[1] code system, has generally been used in conventional fast reactor design activities. The equilibrium cycle method provides an efficient approach for modeling reactor system, compared to the more traditional non-equilibrium cycle fuel management calculation approach. Recently, the equilibrium analysis method has been utilized for designing Accelerator Transmutation of Waste (ATW)[2,3,4] cores, in which a scattered-reloading fuel management scheme is used. Compared with the conventional fast reactors, the ATW core is significantly different in several aspects since its main mission is to incinerate the transuranic (TRU) fuels. The high burnup non-fertile fuel has large variations in composition and reactivity during its lifetime. Furthermore, a relatively short cycle length is utilized in the ATW design to limit the potentially large reactivity swing over a cycle, and consequently 7 or 8-batch fuel management is usually assumed for a high fuel burnup. The validity of the equilibrium analysis method for the ATW core, therefore, needed to be verified. The main objective of this paper is to assess the validity of the equilibrium analysis method for a Na-cooled ATW core[4], which is an alternative core design of the ATW system under development.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Lab., IL (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: US Department of Energy (US)
• DOE Contract Number: W-31109-ENG-38
• OSTI ID: 795824
• Report Number(s): ANL/RAE/CP-107170
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

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BURNUP
DESIGN
FAST REACTORS
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LIFETIME
TRANSMUTATION
WASTES