Core analysis of accident tolerant fuel cladding for SMART reactor under normal operation and rod ejection accident using DRAGON and PARCS

Omid Safarzadeh | A. Pourrostam | S. Talebi

---

URL :   http://research.shahed.ac.ir/WSR/WebPages/Report/PaperView.aspx?PaperID=137771
Date :  2020/09/15
Publish in :     Nuclear Engineering and Technology
DOI :  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.net.2020.08.025
Link :  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.net.2020.08.025
Keywords :ATF,PARCS,REA,Control rod worth,Reactivity coefficient

Abstract :

---

There has been a deep interest in trying tofind better-performing fuel clad motivated by the desire todecrease the likelihood of the reactor barrier failure like what happened in Fukushima in recent years. Inthis study, the effect of move towards accident tolerant fuel (ATF) cladding as the most attracting conceptfor improving reactor safety is investigated for SMART modular reactor. These reactors have less pro-duction cost, short construction time, better safety and higher power density. The SiC and FeCrAl ma-terials are considered as the most potential candidate for ATF cladding, and the results are comparedwith Zircaloy cladding material from reactor physics point of view. In this paper, the calculations areperformed by generating PMAX library by DRAGON lattice physics code to be used for further reactorcore analysis by PARCS code. The differential and integral worth of control and safety rods, reactivitycoefficient, power and temperature distributions, and boric acid concentration during the cycle areanalyzed and compared from the conventional fuel cladding. The rod ejection accident (REA) is alsoperformed to study how the power changed in response to presence of the ATF cladding in the reactorcore. The key quantitativefinding can be summarized as: 20C (3) decrease in average fuel temper-ature, 33 pcm (3) increase in integral rod worth and cycle length, 1.26 pcm/C (50) and 1.05 pcm/C(16) increase in reactivity coefficient of fuel and moderator, respectively.