Equilibrium Core Design of Reaktor Daya Eksperimental

Abstract

A prototype of a high temperature gas-cooled reactor for electric and cogeneration application, called Reaktor Daya Eksperimental (RDE) is being developed at BATAN. RDE is developed to fulfill the huge yet distributed Indonesian energy demand, in particular for the eastern part of Indonesia. As a moving fuel core, analysis of the fuel management of PBR can be divided into the analysis of the start-up phase where the core composition, neutron flux, and power density profile still changing and equilibrium core. Equilibrium core design usually represent the general performance over the entire range of reactor operation. As part of the design development, current paper presents the equilibrium core design of RDE and depressurized-loss-of-forced-cooling (DLOFC) accident analysis. PEBBED code is utilized for the equilibrium core analysis. Results of this study include several possible equilibrium designs for RDE which then the design with 123 fuel pebble recirculated per day with equilibrium keff 1.02571, discharge burnup of 79.36 and maximum power generation 0.66kW per pebble fuel is chosen. Maximum fuel temperature of this design under the DLOFC accident is 1015.9°C which occurred 8.5h after the initiation of the accident. Results of DLOFC accident shows the strong passive safety features of RDE.