Fast Reactors and Accelerator Driven Systems Knowledge Base

Conference Article: Study of thorium fuel cycles burning plutonium in the Module-HTR

Jin Xingqinng; Xu Yunlin (Institute of Nuclear Energy Technology, Tsinghua University Beijing (China))

Abstract

The advantages of HTR module pebble bed reactor and thorium fuel cycles are discussed in this paper. In order to reduce plutonium stockpiles, the thorium fuel cycles are used for HTR module, and plutonium is used as fissile material. The equilibrium core is calculated and analysed for the case of the different heavy metal loading and enrichment. For the case of more than 11 g heavy metal per sphere has a negative temperature coefficient, and the maximum temperature of fuel elements under regular operation and loss of coolant accident is lower than 1500 deg. C. Therefore the feasibility of above scheme is studied.

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key words: burnup; htr-10 reactor; isotope ratio; plutonium; reactor cores; reactor kinetics equations; reactor kinetics; thorium cycle
Reference:
Proceedings of three IAEA meetings held in Vienna in 1997, 1998 and 1999
International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna (Austria)
IAEA-TECDOC--1319, pp:215-220