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Burnable Absorber Design Study for a Passively-Cooled Molten Salt Fast Reactor

  • Nariratri Nur Aufanni (Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) ;
  • Eunhyug Lee (Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) ;
  • Taesuk Oh (Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) ;
  • Yonghee Kim (Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
  • Received : 2023.06.30
  • Accepted : 2023.11.01
  • Published : 2024.03.25

Abstract

The Passively-Cooled Molten Salt Fast Reactor (PMFR) is one of the advanced design concepts of the Molten Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR) which utilizes a natural circulation for the primary loop and aims to attain a long-life operation without any means of fuel reprocessing. For an extended operation period, it is necessary to have enough fissile material, i.e., high excess reactivity, at the onset of operation. Since the PMFR is based on a fast neutron spectrum, direct implementation of a burnable absorber concept for the control of excess reactivity would be ineffective. Therefore, a localized moderator concept that encircles the active core has been envisioned for the PMFR which enables the effective utilization of a burnable absorber to achieve low reactivity swing and long-life operation. The modified PMFR design that incorporates a moderator and burnable absorber is presented, where depletion calculation is performed to estimate the reactor lifetime and reactivity swing to assess the feasibility of the proposed design. All the presented neutronic analysis has been conducted based on the Monte Carlo Serpent2 code with ENDF/B-VII.1 library.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Korean Government (MSIP) (2021M2D2A2076383).

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