Burnup Performance of modified CANDLE shuffling in axial direction on gas cooled fast reactors with UN-Th fuels
Jean Pierre Ndayiragije, Zaki Su^ud, Abdul Waris, Dwi Irwanto

Institut Teknologi Bandung

Abstract

The modified CANDLE (Constant Axial shape of Neutron flux, nuclide densities, and power shape During Life of Energy production) strategy shuffling in an axial direction has been successfully applied to gas cooled fast reactor. This paper investigated the utilization of natural uranium, enriched nitride and Thorium (238U 15N and 232Th) as fuel on 3000MWt reactor power and refuelling every 10 years of burnup cooled by helium gas. The reactor core is partitioned into ten equal-volume regions in the axial direction. Initially, a fuel input (238U 15N and 232Th) is placed in region 1. After ten years of burnup, a fuel in region 1 has been moved to region 2, then to region 3, and so on until the fuel in region 9 was moved to region 10. A fuel from region 10 has been got out. The neutronic computations were performed in two different ways utilizing the SRAC 2006 code and JENDL4.0 as a nuclear data library. Firstly, PIJ has been used for fuel cell calculations and secondly CITATION for reactor core calculation. The results show that the effective multiplication factor is greater than one, this indicates that the reactor is capable to operate through a burn-up period by employing 238U 15N and 232Th as fuel cycle input and the burnup level at the end life is about 30.29% HM.

Keywords: Thorium, Modified CANDLE, SRAC, Effective multiplication factor, burnup

Topic: Nuclear Nonproliferation Issues