Gas-Cooled Thorium Reactor with Fuel Block of the Unified Design

Abstract

Scientific researches of new technological platform realization carried out in Russia are based on ideas of nuclear fuel breeding in closed fuel cycle and physical principles of fast neutron reactors. Innovative projects of low-power reactor systems correspond to the new technological platform. High-temperature gas-cooled thorium reactors with good transportability properties, small installation time, and operation without overloading for a long time are considered perspective. Such small modular reactor systems at good commercial, competitive level are capable of creating the basis of the regional power industry of the Russian Federation. The analysis of information about application of thorium as fuel in reactor systems and its perspective use is presented in the work. The results of the first stage of neutron-physical researches of a 3D model of the high-temperature gas-cooled thorium reactor based on the fuel block of the unified design are given. The calculation 3D model for the program code of MCU-5 series was developed. According to the comparison results of neutron-physical characteristics, several optimum reactor core compositions were chosen. The results of calculations of the reactivity margins, neutron flux distribution, and power density in the reactor core for the chosen core compositions are presented in the work.

Isobaric Heat Capacity of Solid and Liquid Thorium Tetrafluoride

“…In light of these advantages, the use of thorium has been considered in different reactor concepts, such as light-water reactors (LWRs), 3 heavy-water reactors (HWRs), 4 hightemperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs), 5 and molten salt reactors (MSRs). 6 In the latter one, fluoride salts are generally employed using ThF 4 , the subject of this study, as one of the components.…”

Fusion-fission hybrid reactor facility: power profiling

“…1) consists of a plasma source of D-T neutrons and a blanket part. The blanket part is based on the concept of the core of a multi-purpose high-temperature gas-cooled reactor facility of low power (Shamanin et al 2015, Bedenko et al 2019a) with a near-axial region modified for the plasma neutron source (Arzhannikov et al 2016). The modified core (Yurov et al 2016, Bedenko et al 2021b) is a blanket composed of prismatic graphite fuel and non-fuel blocks containing dispersed ( weapons-grade(wg) Pu-Th)O 2 -fuel in cylindrical channels (Bedenko et al 2019a).…”

“…The ongoing research (Arzhannikov et al 2016, 2019, Prikhodko and Arzhannikov 2020, Bedenko et al 2021a) is aimed at the development of small generation and has the prospect of entering the field of energy use in a shorter period. The facility under study is a hybrid reactor, the core (blanket) of which consists of an assembly of prismatic graphite blocks (Shamanin et al 2015, Bedenko et al 2019a) and an extended plasma source of additional D-T-neutrons of a linear configuration (Anikeev et al 2015, Yurov et al 2016.…”

Subcritical assembly with thermonuclear neutron source as device for studies of neutron-physical characteristics of thorium fuel

“…1. Detail description of this reactor core was given in [1]. The fuel assemblies are shown by gray hexagons in left part of the Fig.…”