Neutron fluence analysis of graphite reflector in SPRR-300 during the whole reactor lifetime

Yang, Wenming; Zhang, Songbao; Liu, Yao-Guang; Weili, Niu; Deng, Li

doi:10.1016/j.anucene.2017.03.046

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In addition, some small integral PWRs inherit technology from large reactors designs with steel reflectors, such as I 2 S-LWR (Flaspoehler and Petrovic, 2020) and IRIS (Carelli et al, 2004). Besides, some studies are trying to replace the water in the baffle with other light materials such as graphite and beryllium in the long life-cycle small water coolant designs (Bae and Hong, 2015;Wankui et al, 2017).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A feasibility study of SMART reactor power performance optimizations-part 2: Reflector material selection

Zhong

Norman²,

Wu³

2022

Front. Energy Res.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The neutron reflector is a general component in the nuclear reactor design. The original SMART reactor design used light water as a reflector surrounding the fission zone. However, this design has low uranium utilization rates in the outermost fuel assemblies, so poor fuel economy. In this study, six potential reflector materials, i.e., heavy water, graphite, beryllium metal and its oxide, steel, and tungsten carbide has been investigated as the neutron reflector for SMART. Firstly, the materials’ cross-sections of neutron scattering and (n, 2n) reactions have been cited from ENDF data libraries and analyzed. This analysis found for the neutrons with energy lower than 1 eV, the 9Be atom has six barn elastic scattering cross-sections, and the 9Be(n, 2n)8Be reaction can compensate for neutron leakage. Then, OpenMC is employed to simulate the effect of these reflector materials on power distribution and depletion. Compared with the original design, the beryllium oxide can improve the initial keff from 1.22906 to 1.27446, flat the radial direction power distribution. The analysis on both scales agrees that the beryllium oxide is an efficient neutron reflector choice with good material properties.

show abstract