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Using the Neutron Excess Concept to Determine Starting Fuel Requirements for Minimum Burnup Breed-and-Burn Reactors

Author(s)
Petroski, Robert Carroll; Forget, Benoit Robert Yves; Forsberg, Charles W
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
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Abstract
In a breed-and-burn (B&B) reactor, the reactor is first started with enriched uranium or other fissile material but thereafter can be refueled with natural or depleted uranium. B&B reactors have the potential to achieve >10% uranium utilization in a once-through fuel cycle versus <1% for light water reactors. A newly developed method for analyzing B&B reactors—the “neutron excess” concept—is used to determine the minimum amount of startup fuel needed to establish a desired equilibrium cycle in a minimum burnup B&B reactor. Here, a minimum burnup B&B reactor is defined as one in which neutron leakage is minimized and feed fuel can be discharged at uniform burnup. The neutron excess concept reformulates the k-effective of a system in terms of material depletion quantities: the total number of neutrons absorbed and produced by a given volume of fuel, which are termed “neutron excess quantities.” This concept is useful because neutron excess quantities are straightforward to estimate using simple one-dimensional (1-D) and zero-dimensional (0-D) models. A set of equations is developed that allows the quantity of starter fuel needed to establish a given B&B equilibrium cycle to be expressed in terms of neutron excess quantities. A simple 1-D example of a sodium-cooled, metal fuel reactor with a startup enrichment of 15% is used to illustrate how the method is applied. An estimate for the required amount of starter fuel based on a 0-D depletion model is found to differ by only 3% from the actual amount computed using the 1-D example model.
Date issued
2011-04
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121519
Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Journal
Nuclear Technology
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Citation
Petroski, Robert et al. "Using the Neutron Excess Concept to Determine Starting Fuel Requirements for Minimum Burnup Breed-and-Burn Reactors." Nuclear Technology 175, 2 (August 2011): 388-400 © 2018 Informa UK Limited
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISSN
0029-5450
1943-7471

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