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India’s PFBR attains criticality at last
Prime Minister Narendra Modi proclaimed it “a proud moment for India” when on April 6 the 500-MWe, sodium-cooled Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) achieved initial criticality. This milestone, which comes some 22 years after the continually delayed PFBR project began, marks India’s entrance into the second stage of its three-stage nuclear program, which has the ultimate goal of supporting the country’s nuclear power program with its significant thorium reserves.
Rei Kimura, Yuki Nakai, Tadafumi Sano, Atsushi Sakon, Satoshi Wada
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 11 | November 2023 | Pages 1859-1866
Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2212828
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experiment was conducted that demonstrates a novel core power distribution reconstruction method based on ex-core detectors using time-dependent measurement at the University Teaching and Research Reactor of Kindai University (UTR-KINKI). Although the proposed method PHOEBE was able to identify the power distribution change caused by control rods under static conditions in a previous experiment, time-dependent experiments were not conducted. Hence, the present study measured time-dependent neutron counts using ex-core detectors to reconstruct the power distribution based on PHOEBE. Extraction of the control rods was expected to cause a shift in the reactor power distribution from the north side to the south, and the results of the power distribution reconstruction also demonstrated this power shift. This result experimentally and qualitatively demonstrated the detection of time-dependent power shifts based on PHOEBE. However, quantitative verification was difficult in this study because there are no verified time-dependent three-dimensional neutronics codes available. This issue will be addressed in a future study when a code becomes available.