Abstract
Several core designs of heat pipe reactors with megawatt power were proposed for extreme environments, such as the deep space, the deep sea, and the earthquake locations. However, the existing designs have either the difficulty of manufacture or potential issues of transport. In the present work, a heat pipe design is proposed with an annular fuel element to replace the cylindrical and hexagon fuel elements. In addition, candidate accident tolerant fuels, such as the UN and U3Si2 fuels, are implemented. The neutronic properties of the new reactor design are systematically investigated by the OpenMC Monte Carlo code simulations. It is found that BeO presents a better effect of reducing the axial power deviation than Al2O3. The criticality of the proposed design is verified by two configurations of control drums. The depletion calculations show that each design can operate for decades of years.
Highlights
The heat pipe reactor is a type of micro nuclear reactor generating electricity by the evaporation and liquefaction of the metalworking fluid in the heat pipes to remove the fission heat from the reactor core
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary Material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author
All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version
Summary
The heat pipe reactor is a type of micro nuclear reactor generating electricity by the evaporation and liquefaction of the metalworking fluid in the heat pipes to remove the fission heat from the reactor core. Inspired by the hexagonal array of six fuel pins and a heat pipe, the authors propose the combination of the monolith type and the cylindrical annular fuel element. The megawatt heat pipe reactor investigated in this work was originally proposed by LANL in 2015, of which the designed power is 5 MWt and the designed cycle length is 5 years (Mcclure et al, 2015) This reactor core consists mainly of six monoliths, twelve control drums, two emergency control rods (one is cylindrical, and another is annular), a radial reflector, and a radial absorber. The present work puts forward a modification that replaces the 352 cylindrical fuels and 204 heat pipes with 150 annular-fuelheat-pipe units This decreases the number of holes that have to be dug out in the monolith, and decreases the radial power gradient of the fuel pin.
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