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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Dipanjan Ray, Manish Kumar, Om Pal Singh, Prabhat Munshi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 4 | April 2022 | Pages 478-496
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1987134
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Considerable studies have been carried out to evaluate the feasibility of the breed and burn (B&B) concept over the last few decades by applying various simplified or more practical methodologies. In this note, similar studies are performed by improving the simplified methodology used by Kumar and Singh in “A Study of Transverse Buckling Effect on the Characteristics of Nuclides Burnup Wave in a Fast Neutron Multiplying Media,” [Journal of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Sciience, Vol. 5, p. 4 (2019)] and in other international studies. A consistent parametric approach is adopted for the study on buildup and propagation of a nuclear fuel burnup wave in a fast neutron multiplying medium for two-dimensional cylindrical geometry with azimuthal symmetry. The Multiphysics finite element computational code COMSOL is utilized to solve coupled multigroup neutron diffusion and burnup equations in the U-Pu cycle. The characteristics of the wave are evaluated in terms of transient time (TT) and transient length (TL); TT and TL represent the time and distance covered by the wave in establishing a sustained fuel burnup wave, respectively. The steady-state space is characterized by wave velocity and reaction zone width (full-width at half-maximum and full-width at 10% of maximum).
The results of this study are presented in terms of the characteristics of the transient and steady-state parameters to assess the feasibility of a fuel burnup wave. It is concluded that a sustained fuel burnup wave (about 10 years in a reactor of 5-m length) is attainable in application of the B&B concept in traveling wave technology, although optimization of the transient wave parameters (TT of 1100 days and TL of 2.614 m) is necessary to prolong reactor operating life. The results of the present improved model are compared with the results of Kumar and Singh’s simplified model by performing a sensitivity study of the characterization parameters with radius. Variation of TL with respect to radius (decrement of about 10.6% in the modified model and about 5.4% in the simplified one with the increment in reactor radius from 1.1 to 1.3 m) is relatively less compared to the variation observed for TT (decrement of about 76.5% for the modified approach and about 19.1% for the simplified case). The sensitivity of the wave parameters is studied for different values of neutron source strength used in the analysis.
