Burnable poison optimized on a long-life, annular HTGR core

Abstract

The present work presents analysis results of the core design optimizations for an annular, prismatic High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) with passive decay-heat removal features. Its thermal power is 100 MWt and the operating temperature is 850 °C (1123 K). The neutronic calculations are done for the core with heterogeneous distribution of fuel and burnable poison particles (BPPs) to flatten the reactivity swing and power peaking factor (PPF) during the reactor operation as well as for control rod (CR) insertion into the core to restrain a small excess reactivity less than 1$. The next step of the study is done for evaluation of core reactivity coefficient of temperature.