Study of Different Seed Fuels with Thorium in Accelerator-Driven Subcritical System

This work aimed to develop accelerator-driven systems (ADSs) with a subcritical thorium assembly for fuel breeding and clean energy utilization by using several seed fuels. The ADS reactor core was loaded with three different fuel types, namely, reprocessed fuel, UN, and UO₂ (seed fuel) associated separately with ThO₂ fuel (blanket) in a heterogeneous approach. The Monte Carlo code MCNPX 2.7.0 has been employed to calculate neutronic parameters such as the effective multiplication coefficient (K_eff), the nuclear fuel evolution during the burnup for every case, and the power fraction from seed and blanket fuels. The results indicate that the utilization of thorium (without any contents of ²³³U at the beginning of cycle) with reprocessed fuel allowed more ²³³U production than the UN and UO₂ cases but with shorter cycle length. Introducing thorium fuel with the UN into the ADS core presented an efficient method to produce thermal power with the longest cycle length approaching 20 years.