Analysis of the optimal fuel composition for the Indonesian experimental power reactor

Abstract

AbstractThe optimal fuel composition of the 10 MWth Experimental Power Reactor (RDE), to be built by the Indonesian National Nuclear Energy Agency (BATAN), is a very important design parameter since it will directly affect the fuel cost, new and spent fuel storage capacity, and other back-end environmental burden. The RDE is a very small sized pebble-bed high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) with low enriched uranium (LEU) UO2 TRISO fuel under multipass or once-through-then-out fueling scheme. A scoping study on fuel composition parameters, namely heavy metal (HM) loading per pebble and uranium enrichment is conducted. All burnup, criticality calculations and core equilibrium search are carried out by using BATAN-MPASS, a general in-core fuel management code for pebble bed HTGRs, featured with many automatic equilibrium searching options as well as thermal-hydraulic calculation capability. The RDE User Requirement Document issued by BATAN is used to derive the main core design parameters and constraints. The scoping study is conducted over uranium enrichment in the range of 10 to 20 w/o and HM loading in the range of 4 g to 10 g/pebble. Fissile loading per unit energy generated (kg/GWd) is taken as the objective function for the present scoping study. The analysis results show that the optimal HM loading is around 8 g/pebble. Under the constraint of 80 GWd/t fuel discharge burnup imposed by the technical specification, the uranium enrichment for the optimal HM loading is approximately 13 w/o.