Study on Influence of Nitric Acid Concentration on Criticality Safety

Abstract

The nuclear criticality safety issue in spent fuel reprocessing facilities is closely related to the main process and is almost equally important. It is closely related to the design and operation of reprocessing facilities. The requirement of nuclear criticality safety greatly restricts the operational capacity of the spent fuel reprocessing process, thereby affecting the economic efficiency of reprocessing. In the post-processing process, both multiphase uranium-plutonium mixed systems and multi body interaction systems are involved. The system characteristics are complex, and experimental simulation is difficult, which greatly restricts the further improvement of the production and operation capabilities of the pilot plant. However, due to the criticality safety challenges caused by reactivity changes such as the non-uniformity, dynamic complexity, and instability of the solution in the reactor under boiling nitric acid during the dissolution process, it has become a key research topic in various countries. According to the criticality safety problem of nuclear fuel dissolution process, the criticality effect of nitric acid concentration was studied. The criticality experiment data of nuclear fuel dissolution process were obtained by keeping the concentration of nitric acid in the same fuel concentration. Four experiments were conducted with different concentrations of nitric acid. During the experiment, the subcritical extrapolation method, reactivity interpolation method, and stable power method were used to complete the criticality experiment. The experimental results show that with the increase of nitric acid concentration, the relative deviation of the criticality experiment data is 0.068%, and the relative deviation between the criticality experiment results and the theoretical calculated values is 0.39%. The research results show that the reactivity of the system gradually increases as the concentration of nitric acid decreases. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the reactivity changes caused by changes in the criticality safety of the spent fuel dissolution process, and high attention is needed. According to the agreement between the experiment and the theoretical calculation, it is appropriate to use the Monte Carlo code MONK to calculate and analyze the acidity effect of the solid-liquid two-phase solution system, which can be used as a nuclear criticality safety control engineering design process for the solid-liquid two-phase nuclear fuel dissolution system. This series of experiment data can be used for calculation, verification, and safety evaluation of critical analysis under solid-liquid coexistence conditions of nuclear fuel. This paper results provide data support for improving the criticality safety control level of critical post-processing equipment.

Keywords

• nuclear fuel
• simulation dissolution process
• nitric acid
• criticality safety