An Evaluation of the Annular Fuel and Bottle-Shaped Fuel Concepts for Sodium Fast Reactors
Name
Buongiorno_An Evaluation.pdf
Size
1.27 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4252f8401f07b74dd651d4b568a4c6b1
Author(s)
Memmott, Matthew
Buongiorno, Jacopo
Hejzlar, Pavel
Date Issued
February 2011
Journal
Nuclear Technology
Publisher
American Nuclear Society
Citation
Memmott, Matthew, Jacobo Buongiorno and Pavel Hejzlar. "An Evaluation of the Annular Fuel and Bottle-Shaped Fuel Concepts for Sodium Fast Reactors." Nuclear Technology 173.2 (2011) p.162-175.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Two innovative fuel concepts, the internally and externally cooled annular fuel and the bottle-shaped fuel, were investigated with the goal of increasing the power density and reduce the pressure drop in the sodium-cooled fast reactor, respectively. The concepts were explored for both high- and low-conversion core configurations, and metal and oxide fuels. The annular fuel concept is best suited for low-conversion metal-fuelled cores, where it can enable a power uprate of ~20%; the magnitude of the uprate is limited by the fuel clad chemical interaction temperature constraint during a hypothetical flow blockage of the inner-annular channel. The bottle-shaped fuel concept is best suited for tight high-conversion ratio cores, where it can reduce the overall core pressure drop in the fuel channels by >30%, with a corresponding increase in core height between 15 and 18%. A full-plant RELAP5-3D model was created to evaluate the transient performance of the innovative fuel configurations during the station blackout and unprotected transient over power. The transient analysis confirmed the good thermal-hydraulic performance of the annular and bottle-shaped fuel designs with respect to the reference case with traditional solid fuel pins.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
http://www.new.ans.org/store/j_11545
