Abstract
Several high-temperature gas-cooled reactor concepts (and more recently, salt-cooled designs such as the fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor) feature core designs employing continuously circulating fuel pebbles. These reactor designs permit both continuous online refueling of fuel elements as well as higher overall achievable discharge burnups. However, rapid calculation of time-dependent fuel isotopic inventories proves challenging for this class of dynamic systems with current analysis tools. While iterative approaches employing coupled neutron transport have been developed to solve this issue, rapid depletion analysis techniques are needed to calculate time-dependent inventories for individual pebbles and batches (and thus the construction of full-core inventory at equilibrium). We propose a depletion analysis strategy for this type of system for cores at equilibrium. Drawing upon previous neutronic analysis of the PBMR-400 equilibrium core, we demonstrate the viability of developing collapsed one-group cross section libraries suitable for performing rapid depletion analyses with SCALE.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2022 |
| Publisher | American Nuclear Society |
| Pages | 1298-1307 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9780894487873 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2022 |
| Event | 2022 International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2022 - Pittsburgh, United States Duration: May 15 2022 → May 20 2022 |
Publication series
| Name | Proceedings of the International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2022 |
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Conference
| Conference | 2022 International Conference on Physics of Reactors, PHYSOR 2022 |
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| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | Pittsburgh |
| Period | 05/15/22 → 05/20/22 |
Funding
This work was performed under the support of Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Contract IAA 31310019N0012; the authors wish to gratefully acknowledge the support of the NRC for this work, and in particular program manager Don Algama. *This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (https://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
Keywords
- SCALE
- TRISO
- depletion
- fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor
- high-temperature gas-cooled reactor