Neutronic Study of HTTR 30 MWt with Thorium Fuel
Andrey (a), Abdul Waris (b*), Dwi Irwanto
(a) Department of Physics, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Bandung Institute of Technology, Jl. Ganesa 10, Bandung 40132, Indonesia
(b) Nuclear Physics & Biophysics Research Division, Department of Physics, Faculty of
Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Bandung Institute of Technology, Jl. Ganesa 10, Bandung 40132, Indonesia
*awaris[at]fi.itb.ac.id
Abstract
The high temperature engineering test reactor (HTTR) is a block-type high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) developed by Japan. This reactor is one of the Generation IV nuclear energy systems and can operate with coolant outlet temperature of 950°C. In this study, the neutronic analysis is carried out for the HTTR reactor with thorium fuel and helium coolant. As thorium has no naturally occurring fissile isotope, it requires other fissile isotope to sustain the nuclear chain reaction. In this study, U-233 is used as the fissile isotope. The fuel blocks used in the core vary from 3.3% to 7.5% of U-233 content. Several neutronic parameters are analyzed, such as effective multiplication factor, conversion ratio, neutron spectrum, power density distribution, and power peaking factor. The calculations are performed by PIJ and CITATION modules on SRAC2006 code with JENDL-4.0 as the nuclear data library. The cell-burnup calculations are conducted with two models, with and without microscopic cell definition in the fuel compact. The core calculations are conducted with triangular-z and hexagonal-z core geometry.
Keywords: HTTR, JENDL-4.0, SRAC2006, Thorium
Topic: Nuclear and Radiation Computation