HELIUM GAS-COOLED FAST REACTOR DESIGN STUDY USING URANIUM CARBIDE – THORIUM CARBIDE MIXTURE FUEL WITH AXIAL MODIFIED CANDLE SCHEME

• Main Author: Rara Galih, Niken
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/41939
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

As we know, human need of energy increase time to time. In order to fulfill human necessity of energy, in unison with the urge to provide long term clean energy for earth sustainability, building Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) seems to be the right answer. In the effort to support non-proliferation treaty, scientist had been developing fast reactor burning scheme design CANDLE (Sekimoto, 2010) which uses natural Uranium as its fuel. The Modified CANDLE (MCANDLE) as the modification of the previous CANDLE scheme has become the object of this research. Modified CANDLE divide the burning core into several discreet regions. This research uses Natural Uranium-Carbide and Natural Thorium-Carbide as fuel and Helium gas as coolant which was applied to an axial MCANDLE scheme reactor. The core size has been varied to optimize the design. Neutronic analysis has been applied to this research with burn up level, effective multiplication factor (k eff), infinite multiplication factor (k inf), and conversion ratio (CR) as observed parameter. Uranium percentage in fuel has been varied to reduce undesired power peaking. Neutronic calculation has been calculated using SRAC while the core design was calculated using FI-ITB-CH1 program. Combination of Uranium Carbide and Uranium Carbide – Thorium Carbide mixture fuel has reduced the power peaking factor of the reactor. Optimization has been reached as the radial length of the reactor set to 180cm and the axial length to 303cm.