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Playing the “bad guy” to enhance next-generation safety
Sometimes, cops and robbers is more than just a kid’s game. At the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, researchers are channeling their inner saboteurs to discover vulnerabilities in next-generation nuclear reactors, making sure that they’re as safe as possible before they’re even constructed.
Dalin Zhang, Xue-Nong Chen, Fabrizio Gabrielli, Andrei Rineiski, Werner Maschek
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 61 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 287-292
Modeling and Simulations | Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Emerging Nuclear Energy Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A13434
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The concept of traveling wave reactor (TWR) applies the mechanism of self sustainable and propagation nuclear fission traveling waves in fertile media of 238U and 232Th to achieve very high fuel utilization. However, the long wave length of such fission traveling wave puts a limit on the applicability of the TWR concept. The axial fuel shuffling strategy is proposed based on the mechanism of asymptotic nuclear fission traveling wave, and is applied to a sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) loading metallic 238U fuel. The multi-group deterministic neutronic code ERANOS with JEFF3.1 data library is used as a basic tool to perform the neutronics and burn-up calculations. The calculations are firstly performed in a 1-D case for parametric understanding, and further extended to a 2-D R-Z case. The shuffling calculations for the 1-D and 2-D SFR model described in this paper brought about some interesting results. The results indicate that keff parabolically varies with the shuffling period, while the burn-up increases linearly. The highest burn-up achieved in 2-D case is 46at%. The power shape distortion in 2-D case is observed, and the power peaking factor is much higher than that in 1-D case, but it decreases with the shuffling period increasing.