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INL makes first fuel for Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment
Idaho National Laboratory has announced the creation of the first batch of enriched uranium chloride fuel salt for the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment (MCRE). INL said that its fuel production team delivered the first fuel salt batch at the end of September, and it intends to produce four additional batches by March 2026. MCRE will require a total of 72–75 batches of fuel salt for the reactor to go critical.
Chae Y. Yang, Nam Z. Cho
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 101 | Number 3 | March 1989 | Pages 243-258
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE89-A23612
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A nonlinear reactor model is developed taking into account several feedback effects, such as moderator and fuel temperatures, xenon absorption, and soluble boron concentration, through energy balance relations in the core. The resulting equation belongs to a class of nonlinear boundary value problems, and it is shown through bifurcation theory that there may exist multiple steady-state solutions for a range of parameters that correspond to various design and operating conditions. Solutions are obtained numerically for ranges of the parameters by the arc-length continuation method in combination with Newton’s method. Stability analysis is also applied to each solution to investigate whether the solution is stable or not. When the stable and unstable regions of the steady-state solutions are plotted for a wide range of the parameters, we can choose a range of the reactor design and operating conditions such that the reactor does not encounter unstable situations.