Breeding Properties Study on High-Power Thorium Molten Salt Reactor

Abstract

Molten salt reactor (MSR), the only one using liquid fuel in the six types “Generation IV” reactors, is very different from reactors in operation now and has initiated very extensive interests all over the world. This paper is primarily aimed at investigating the breeding characteristics of high-power thorium molten salt reactor (TMSR) based on the two-fluid molten salt breeder reactor (MSBR) with a superior breeding performance. We explored the optimized structure to be a thorium-based molten salt breeder reactor with different core conditions and different postprocessing programs, and finally got the breeding ratio of 1.065 in our TMSR model. At last we analyzed the transient security of our optimized model with results show that the temperature coefficient of core is −3 pcm/K and a 2000 pcm reactivity insertion can be successfully absorbed by the core if the insertion time is more than or equal to 5 s and the core behaves safely.