Neutronic and thermal-hydraulic calculations under steady state and transient conditions for a generic pebble bed fluoride salt cooled high-temperature reactor

Abstract

Here, we develop multiphysics coupled neutronics/thermal-hydraulics models for a recently available generic Fluoride-salt-cooled High-temperature Reactor (FHR) at equilibrium core burnup conditions with reactivity control mechanisms. We utilized the pebble bed reactor transient tool KP-AGREE with multigroup homogenized cross-sections generated by the continuous energy Monte Carlo neutron transport code Serpent to simulate transient events for an FHR. Comparing global reactor parameters and safety characteristics between Serpent and published results to standalone neutronic calculations in KP-AGREE verifies our initial conditions for our transient models. This work explores three separate transients: a loss of flow accident, an overcooling accident, and a total control rod withdrawal accident. The boundary conditions of these scenarios come from either transient benchmark definitions of a gas-cooled pebble bed reactor or transient analysis of a similar FHR design. For the loss of flow accident, our predicted peak fuel and coolant outlet temperatures show a similar response to published values, albeit slightly higher, with differences between values attributed to our modeling assumptions. The overcooling transient simulation predicts a 52 K temperature increase in the maximum fuel kernel temperature and an approximately 32.6% increase in total core power due to the negative coolant temperature feedback of the FHR design. Our control rod removal transients predicted a 235 K increase in maximum fuel kernel temperature and a 107.5% increase in total core power. For all transient cases, the fuel temperature remained significantly lower than the temperature limit, but coolant outlet temperatures for the reactivity-initiated accident exceeded external core material temperature limits.