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Conference Article: Physical Designs and Calculations For The First Full Power Operation of The 10MW High Temperature Gascooled Reactor-Test Module (HTR-10)

Abstract

The 10 MW High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor Test—Module (HTR-10) is a pebble bed experimental reactor built by the Institute of Nuclear Energy Technology (INET) of Tsinghua University, and reached its first criticality on December 1, 2000. Afterwards, a series of tests were done for the reactor system under lower temperature. The reactor reached the full power state of 10MW firstly at 19:30 January 26, 2003 and ran continuously for 72 hours. This paper introduces the prediction and verification in the process of raising the reactor power. The neutronics analysis code VSOP is used for the prediction and verification of the first full power operation. The characteristics of pebble-bed high temperature gas-cooled reactors are taken into account. At first, through the verification of lower power tests at the power level of 3.44 MW, with 22400 mixed spheres loaded in the core, the experiences with physical calculation of power operation were gained. Then the prediction proceeded on the estimated parameters at the full power state. The calculations resulted in the 23900 mixture balls loaded into the core for full power operation. At last, verification calculations were done according to the measured parameters at the full power state. The first full power experiment shows that the predicted number of mixed spheres and the experimental number are in good agreement with a relative error of less than 2.0 %. Therefore, the physical designs and calculations are credible and can meet the practical requirements.

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Reference:

Proceedings of the Conference on High Temperature Reactors, Beijing, China, September, 22-24, 2004

International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna (Austria)

HTR-2004, pp:1-7