Neutronic Assessment of Transmutation Target Compositions in Heterogeneous Sodium Fast Reactor Geometries

Samuel E. Bays ; Rodolfo M. Ferrer ; Michael A. Pope ; Benoit Forget ; Mehdi Asgari

关键词: radial heterogeneous targets;    sodium fast reactor;    transuranic burning;   

DOI  :  10.2172/926345
RP-ID  :  INL/EXT-07-13643
PID  :  OSTI ID: 926345

学科分类：核能源与工程

美国|英语

来源: SciTech Connect

【 摘 要 】

The sodium fast reactor is under consideration for consuming the transuranic waste in the spent nuclear fuel generated by light water reactors. This work is concerned with specialized target assemblies for an oxide-fueled sodium fast reactor that are designed exclusively for burning the americium and higher mass actinide component of light water reactor spent nuclear fuel (SNF). The associated gamma and neutron radioactivity, as well as thermal heat, associated with decay of these actinides may significantly complicate fuel handling and fabrication of recycled fast reactor fuel. The objective of using targets is to isolate in a smaller number of assemblies these concentrations of higher actinides, thus reducing the volume of fuel having more rigorous handling requirements or a more complicated fabrication process. This is in contrast to homogeneous recycle where all recycled actinides are distributed among all fuel assemblies. Several heterogeneous core geometries were evaluated to determine the fewest target assemblies required to burn these actinides without violating a set of established fuel performance criteria. The DIF3D/REBUS code from Argonne National Laboratory was used to perform the core physics and accompanying fuel cycle calculations in support of this work. Using the REBUS code, each core design was evaluated at the equilibrium cycle condition.