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

Nuclear Engineering and Design

0029-5493 (ISSN)

Vol. 253 269-276

Subject Categories

Environmental Engineering

Areas of Advance

Energy

DOI

10.1016/j.nucengdes.2012.08.028

More information

Created

10/8/2017