4 research outputs found
The utilization of thorium in Small Modular Reactors â Part I: Neutronic assessment
This work presents a neutronic assessment to convert a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) with uranium core
to the thorium mixed oxide core with minimum possible changes in the geometry and main parameters
of SMR core. This option is due to most of SMR are designed to be strongly poisoned in the beginning of
cycle and to have a long cycle. Thorium can be used as an absorber in the beginning of the cycle and also
be used as a fertile material during the cycle, it seems to be a good option to use (Th/U)O2 as SMRâs fuel.
The main neutronic objectives of this study is achieving longer cycle length for SMR by using the minimum
possible amount of burnable poison and soluble boron in comparison with reference core. The
Korean SMART reactor as a certified design SMR has been chosen as the reference core. The calculations
have been performed by MCNP code for homogeneous and heterogeneous seed and blanket concept fuel
assemblies. The results obtained show that the heterogeneous fuel assembly is the one which gives
longer cycle length and used lower amount of burnable poison and soluble boron, and also consumes
almost the same amount of 235U