Investigation on Criticality and Burnup Performance of Pebble Bed Reactor with Thorium-based Nuclear Fuel

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Thorium-based nuclear fuel has become an interesting subject for a variety of research with a wide range of applications. Research focusing on thorium-based fuel is aimed to overcome the scarcity and limitation of natural uranium resources as an alternative nuclear fuel in a thermal reactor. As thorium has no naturally occurring fissile isotope, it requires other fissile isotopes in order to be converted into fissile 233U to produce energy. The isotopes 235U and 2359Pu are two of the few alternatives available as the fissile nuclei for a thorium-fueled reactor. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the criticality and burnup performance of pebble bed reactor using two options of thorium-based fuel–namely, UO2-ThO2 and PuO2-ThO2. The HTR-10 was chosen as the reactor model. A series of criticality calculations with various uranium contents in UO2-ThO2 fuel and various plutonium contents in PuO2-ThO2 fuel was conducted using the Monte Carlo transport code MCNP6 and continuous energy nuclear data library ENDF/B-VII. The calculation result shows that 35% plutonium content in PuO2-ThO2 fuel has comparable criticality with 80% uranium content in UO2-ThO2 fuel. The former is shown to be better to ensure longer reactor operational time. However, that is due to the higher fissile fraction compared to that of the latter fuel. Meanwhile, thorium played little part in prolonging reactor criticality, as 233U production is not particularly significant.