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Title: Enhancing TREAT’s Pulsing Capabilities Using TREAT Upgrade Fuel

Abstract

The Transient Reactor Test Facility (TREAT) at Idaho National Laboratory is an air-cooled, thermal, heterogeneous facility used to test reactor materials in simulated accident conditions by inducing fission heating with intense neutron pulses. TREAT operated from 1959 until 1994 with the primary goal of testing fast reactor fuels and was brought back online in 2017 to re-establish DOE's nuclear fuels transient testing capabilities. Beginning in the late 1970s, Idaho National Laboratory worked in conjunction with other organizations to increase TREAT's capability for in-pile testing. While these upgrades had not been implemented by the time the reactor was put into standby mode, new assemblies and graphite-urania fuel blocks with increased uranium concentrations had already been designed and fabricated. This project, as part of Idaho National Laboratory's Department of Reactor Physics, modeled the TREAT Upgrade (TU) fuel assemblies in MCNP and implemented them in an existing TREAT model. Calculations were performed using INL's high performance computer to find a critical combination of TU and standard fuel and this geometry's excess reactivity. Future work will include calculating a power coupling factor in the experiment, determining power peaking factors throughout the core, and assessing how much reactivity would be added by replacing the Inconel-625more » cladding with silicon carbide.« less

Authors:
 [1]
  1. Idaho National Laboratory
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security (AU), Office of Nuclear Safety
OSTI Identifier:
1546710
Report Number(s):
INL/EXP-19-55146-Rev000
DOE Contract Number:  
AC07-05ID14517
Resource Type:
S&T Accomplishment Report
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
73 - NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS; TREAT; TREAT Upgrade

Citation Formats

Clements, Kayla Beth. Enhancing TREAT’s Pulsing Capabilities Using TREAT Upgrade Fuel. United States: N. p., 2019. Web. doi:10.2172/1546710.
Clements, Kayla Beth. Enhancing TREAT’s Pulsing Capabilities Using TREAT Upgrade Fuel. United States. https://doi.org/10.2172/1546710
Clements, Kayla Beth. 2019. "Enhancing TREAT’s Pulsing Capabilities Using TREAT Upgrade Fuel". United States. https://doi.org/10.2172/1546710. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1546710.
@article{osti_1546710,
title = {Enhancing TREAT’s Pulsing Capabilities Using TREAT Upgrade Fuel},
author = {Clements, Kayla Beth},
abstractNote = {The Transient Reactor Test Facility (TREAT) at Idaho National Laboratory is an air-cooled, thermal, heterogeneous facility used to test reactor materials in simulated accident conditions by inducing fission heating with intense neutron pulses. TREAT operated from 1959 until 1994 with the primary goal of testing fast reactor fuels and was brought back online in 2017 to re-establish DOE's nuclear fuels transient testing capabilities. Beginning in the late 1970s, Idaho National Laboratory worked in conjunction with other organizations to increase TREAT's capability for in-pile testing. While these upgrades had not been implemented by the time the reactor was put into standby mode, new assemblies and graphite-urania fuel blocks with increased uranium concentrations had already been designed and fabricated. This project, as part of Idaho National Laboratory's Department of Reactor Physics, modeled the TREAT Upgrade (TU) fuel assemblies in MCNP and implemented them in an existing TREAT model. Calculations were performed using INL's high performance computer to find a critical combination of TU and standard fuel and this geometry's excess reactivity. Future work will include calculating a power coupling factor in the experiment, determining power peaking factors throughout the core, and assessing how much reactivity would be added by replacing the Inconel-625 cladding with silicon carbide.},
doi = {10.2172/1546710},
url = {https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1546710}, journal = {},
number = ,
volume = ,
place = {United States},
year = {Thu Aug 08 00:00:00 EDT 2019},
month = {Thu Aug 08 00:00:00 EDT 2019}
}