Study of Neutronic Performance of Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor Design for Various Output Power Using Radial Fuel Shuffling Strategy

Abstract

Study of neutronic performance analysis of Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor (SFR) design based on the variations of output power using radial fuel suffling strategy has been performed. SFR is a type of the generation IV reactor that is widely researched for application on a commercial scale. The reactor design uses natural uranium as a fuel and Sodium as a coolant. The research has been carried out by using the SRAC code and JENDL-3.2 as a library with two dimensional R- Z suffling strategy of cylinder core for variations of power output 300, 350, 400, 450 and 500 MWTh. The neutronic parameters such as a multiplication factor (k-eff and k-inf) and burn-up analysis are observed. The SFR core is separated into 10 regions having the same volume fraction in the radial direction. At beginning of burn-up process, the reactor core is only filled with natural uranium fuel called fresh fuel and prepared for the one cycle of 10 years of burn-up time. The burn-up result in the first region is shifted into the second region, the burn-up result in the second region is shifted into the third region, and so on until burn-up result into the tenth region. The burn-up result in the tenth region is removed from the reactor core, then the first region can be filled with fresh natural uranium fuel and so on up to 10 times fuel cycles of reactor operation. The neutron calculation results indicate that the multiplication factors (k-eff and k-inf) in a critical condition are occurred on the 300 MWTh of output power. Overall, the output power of 300 MWTh has requirements and a greater chance of being operated for SFR designed.