Study of the Allegro Core Performance

Abstract

The presented paper is related to introduction of the design and neutronic characterization of the start-up core developed for Gas cooled Fast Reactor (GFR) demonstrator. Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava joined the project ALLEGRO in last decade within the consortium of middle-European institutions. In the development plan of the GEN IV GFR the ALLEGRO demonstrator is one of the most necessary steps. The ALLEGRO reactor is small helium cooled 75 MWth thermal power unit. Its main objective is to demonstrate the key GFR technologies and to perform tests of innovative materials. The reactor core is based on the standard and MOX pin type fuel in the first phase of the project. The active core of a large GFR 2400 makes use of ceramic materials, but in the first ALLEGRO core MOX fuel will be used. It will be mainly to demonstrate the viability of the technology and to acquire necessary experimental data for further research. In the presented works are identified the main discrepancies between ALLEGRO and GFR 2400 designs, the sensitivity analysis was performed for both reactors. Neutronic characterization is aimed to determination of the standard neutronic parameters using conventional computational systems. The results of sensitivity and uncertainty calculations are presented in conjunction with similarity analysis.