Neutronic and Severe Safety Aspects of 1500 MWth Lead and Sodium Cooled Fast Reactors

In this paper, neutronics and severe safety characteristics of Lead-cooled Fast Reactor (LFR) and Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR) cores concurrently breeding plutonium and burning minor actinides (MAs) are investigated. For LFR, two core variants were modeled: with active core part 90 cm and 120 cm tall. Monte Carlo code was used for neutronics and European Accident Code EAC-2 for severe safety studies. It is shown that both 1500 MWth LFR and SFR start-up cores can transmute on average 70 kg of MAs annually in the homogeneous mode. In this case, 5% of MAs were admixed to the core fuel. More than 110 kg of MAs can be burned per year when 10% of MAs are additionally added to axial and radial blankets. LFR core designs show advantages over SFR cores regarding severe safety behavior due to higher thermal inertia, better natural circulation behavior and the higher boiling point of lead.

TUCEK Kamil;  CARLSSON Johan;  VIDOVIC Dragan;  WIDER Hartmut; 

2008-02-08

American Nuclear Society

JRC37936

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC37936,