Abstract
The Advanced High-Temperature Reactor (AHTR) is a 3400 MWth fluoride-salt-cooled high-temperature reactor (FHR) that uses TRISO particle fuel compacted into slabs rather than spherical or cylindrical fuel compacts. Simplified methods are required for parametric design studies such that analyzing the entire feasible design space for an AHTR is tractable. These simplifications include fuel homogenization techniques to increase the speed of neutron transport calculations in depletion analysis and equilibrium depletion analysis methods to analyze systems with multi-batch fuel management schemes.
This paper presents three elements of significant novelty. First, the Reactivity-Equivalent Physical Transformation (RPT) methodology usually applied in systems with coated-particle fuel in cylindrical and spherical geometries has been extended to slab geometries. Secondly, based on this newly developed RPT method for slab geometries, a methodology that uses Monte Carlo depletion approaches was further developed to search for the maximum discharge burnup in a multi-batch system by iteratively estimating the beginning of equilibrium cycle (BOEC) composition and sampling different discharge burnups. This Iterative Equilibrium Depletion Search (IEDS) method fully defines an equilibrium fuel cycle (keff, power, flux, and composition evolutions) but is computationally demanding, although feasible on single-processor workstations. Finally, an analytical method, the Non-Linear Reactivity Model, was developed by expanding the linear reactivity model to include an arbitrary number of higher order terms so that single-batch depletion results could be extrapolated to estimate the maximum discharge burnup and BOEC keff in systems with multi-batch fuel management schemes. Results from this method were benchmarked against equilibrium depletion analysis results using the IEDS.