Fuel options for nuclear ship reactors featuring reactivity swing below one dollar

Abstract

Environmental protection against air pollution and climate change has drawn great and increasing public attention in recent decades. Nuclear power involving no pollutant and CO2 emissions provides a more sustainable way for commercial shipping activities. Nine fuel options are simulated to find the combinations of key parameters that make the core to have a lifetime reactivity swing below one dollar. Such a low reactivity swing, when combined with a negative feedback reactivity coefficient, may facilitate passive load follow and passive safety, which means the reactivity can be controlled through temperature or thermal expansion of the reactor core. These fuel options are compared regarding reactor physics and thermal hydraulics, under certain constraints associated with ship reactors. WIMS code is used for burnup, perturbation and parameter calculating. MONK and SERPENT codes are used to verify the WIMS model. It is found that ship-based lead-cooled fast reactor can be designed to have superior core safety and good economics. Different fuel options show diverse characteristics in terms of power output limits, refuelling intervals, natural circulation cooling capabilities and other safety related parameters.