Neutronic characteristics of an OTTO refueling PBMR
Journal article, 2012

Neutronic characteristics were investigated for a once-through-then-out (OTTO) refueling scheme based on the 400 MWt pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR) and compared with that of a reference multi-pass scheme. The core was loaded with new fuel pebbles which were designed with Gd2O3 particles to flatten the axial power profile. The Gd2O3 design was considered in a multi-parameter optimization to maximize the average discharged burnup while maintaining a limited power peak and ensuring core criticality. The results show that the OTTO scheme using the new fuel pebbles can achieve the maximum average discharged burnup of about 75 GWd/t, at which the core neutronic characteristics are comparable with that of the reference multi-pass scheme. This means that the efficiency of fuel utilization of the OTTO scheme is about 21% less than that of the multi-pass scheme (95 GWd/t).

power profile

refueling

OTTO

burnup

PBMR

Author

Hoai Nam Tran

Chalmers, Applied Physics, Nuclear Engineering

Van Khanh Hoang

Institute for Nuclear Science and Technology

Published in

Nuclear Engineering and Design

0029-5493 (ISSN)

Vol. 253 p. 269-276

Categorizing

Subject Categories (SSIF 2011)

Environmental Engineering

Areas of Advance

Energy

Identifiers

DOI

10.1016/j.nucengdes.2012.08.028

More information

Created

10/8/2017